L2TReC Scholars Present a Pre-Conference Workshop at 2024 SWCOLT
On February 29th, Elnaz Kia, in her role as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at L2TReC, delivered a well-received preconference workshop at the 2024 Southwest Conference on Language Teaching (SWCOLT) in Honolulu, HI. She was joined by L2TReC's esteemed former director, Fernando Rubio, and Valerie Sky, an assistant professor of applied linguistics at Cal Poly Pomona. Their collaborative effort was noted for its engagement and attendance, contributing positively to the conference.
Title: Using a Learner Corpus to Create Pedagogical Materials for Language Classrooms
Date: Thursday, February 29th, 9AM to 12PM
Presented by: Fernando Rubio, Elnaz Kia, Valerie Sky
Location: SWCOLT 2024 - Hilton Waikiki Beach Hotel, Honolulu, HI
Proposal: The objective of this workshop is to equip both present and prospective language educators with the skills needed to generate data-driven teaching activities tailored for their classrooms utilizing learner corpora. Workshop participants will learn about pedagogical applications of corpus linguistics in the language classroom and build necessary skills to create their own data-driven teaching materials. To participate, the attendees will need their laptops and internet access.
First, the presenters will briefly introduce corpus linguistics and various types of corpora and engage the audience through examples using YouGlish and COCA. After the participants are comfortable with the idea of a corpus, they will learn about the specifics and benefits of learner corpora using the Corpus and Repository of Writing (Crow; staples & Dilger, 2018 -) and the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE; Ishikawa, 2023).
Second, the participants will learn the necessary skills that are needed for creation of a corpus in any language. They will use example written responses in English from ICNALE (or their own student samples) to follow steps necessary to construct their mini-corpora. After that, the participants will learn how to use basic corpus linguistic tools and techniques using AntConc (Anothony, 2023) and the ICNALE corpus.
Finally, the presenters will show example activities created by dual language immersion teachers in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. These data-driven activities were developed using two multilingual learner corpora, the multilingual corpus of second language immersion (CUDLI; Rubio & Schnur, 2019). The participants will break into focus language groups to explore and familiarize themselves with the activities in the language of their choice and collaboratively analyze concordance lines to brainstorm their own corpus-based tasks.
Southwest Conference on Language Teaching (SWCOLT)
The Southwest Conference on Language Teaching is a regional world language teachers' organization that hosts an annual conference in partnership with state world language teacher associations. The participating states in SWCOLT are Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah.
