A presentation by Dr. Xiaofei Lu on the Graphic Online Language Diagnostic (GOLD) tool developed by the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) at The Pennsylvania State University.

1. A Corpus-based Approach to Tracking L2 Development
Xiaofei Lu
Center for Advanced Language Proficiency
Education and Research
The Pennsylvania State University
November 20, 2009 CALPER at Penn State

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Outline
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Corpora and learner corpora
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Graphic Online Language Diagnostic (GOLD) CALPER at Penn State

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Corpora and learner corpora
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What is a corpus
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Types of corpora
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Learner corpus design
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Learner corpora and L2 development CALPER at Penn State

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What is a corpus
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Leech (1992):
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an unexciting phenomenon, a helluva lot of text, stored on a computer
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Sinclair (1991, 2004):
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a collection of naturally-occurring language text in electronic form, selected according to external criteria to represent, as far as possible, a language or language variety as a source of data for linguistic research
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Types of corpora
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General-purpose vs. specialized corpora
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The British National Corpus
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Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
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Synchronic vs. diachronic corpora
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Spoken vs. written corpora
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Native vs. learner corpora
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International Corpus of Learner English
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Learner corpus design
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Purpose and type of corpus
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Cross-sectional vs. longitudinal
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Spoken vs. written
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Representativeness and size
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Learner corpus design (cont.)
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External criteria for text selection
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Communicative function of the text
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Mode, medium, interaction, genre
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Encoding meaningful metadata information
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Learner: L1, gender, program level, discipline …
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Sample: date, mode, task, genre, rating …
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Facilitates contrastive and longitudinal studies CALPER at Penn State

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Learner corpora and L2 development
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Samples from same students at different times
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Did (targeted) language development take place?
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Was a particular pedagogical intervention effective?
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Samples from different students
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What areas do students show different levels of development?
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What factors affect students’ language development? CALPER at Penn State

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Graphic Online Language Diagnostic
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A free online tool for teachers to assess their students’ language development
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Developed at CALPER, Penn State, funded by DOE
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Project co-directors: Xiaofei Lu and Michael McCarthy
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Teachers can use GOLD to
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Compile, upload, and manage their own corpora
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Share corpora with each other
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Search and analyze corpora CALPER at Penn State

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Graphic Online Language Diagnostic
Please know: GOLD is a free tool to use for language educators. Teachers need to register and apply for access. Teachers need to provide the name of their institution. We will verify whether your name is in the school’s directory. Explicitly not for commercial use.

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Corpus compilation
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A user can compile a corpus by
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Directly compiling and uploading an XML file
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Using the easy-to-use guided XML creation interface
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An uploaded corpus can be easily managed
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Documents can be added or deleted
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The whole corpus can be deleted
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Content and metadata of individual documents can be easily accessed CALPER at Penn State

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Corpus sharing
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GOLD facilitates easy data sharing
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A corpus may be set to be
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Private, shared, or public
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Corpus owner may give other users right to
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View, add, edit, or delete corpora CALPER at Penn State

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Basic corpus information
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Word count
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Alphabetic or numeric order
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Can be downloaded as a text file
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Corpus and document statistics
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Mean sentence length
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Mean word length
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Type-token ratio CALPER at Penn State

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Corpus search
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Select one or more corpora to search
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Specify key words or phrases
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May use the wildcard character, e.g. book*
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Specify contexts
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Size of context window
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Context words and their positions
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Specify metadata conditions CALPER at Penn State

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Corpus search results
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Display of search results
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Sortable KWIC display of search results
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Sortable graphic display of search results
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Lexical bundle/collocation search
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Procedure
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Select one or more corpora to search
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Specify search word
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Specify contexts
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Specify metadata conditions
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Search results
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Sortable list of n-grams found in selected corpora CALPER at Penn State

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Summary of features
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Difference from other online tools
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Can create, share, and search multiple corpora
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Can easily search subsets of data
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Can work with any language
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Summary of corpus analysis functions
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Word list
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Corpus and document statistics: mean sentence length, mean word length, type-token ratio
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Corpus search and collocation search CALPER at Penn State

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Sample questions to ask
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With data from an individual student, one can either describe or track development in
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Patterns of usages of words and phrases – frequency, underuse, overuse, etc.
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Lexical and syntactic complexity
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Appropriate usage of words and phrases in context
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Patterns of usages of lexical buncles CALPER at Penn State

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Sample questions to ask (cont.)
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With data from different (groups of) students, one can compare similarities or differences among different (groups of) students in terms of
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Patterns of usages of words and phrases – frequency, underuse, overuse, etc.
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Lexical and syntactic complexity
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Appropriate usage of words and phrases in context
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Patterns of usages of lexical buncles CALPER at Penn State

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Future enhancements
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Corpora for benchmarking
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Multilingual natural language processing
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Suggestions on desirable functions welcome CALPER at Penn State

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How to learn more about GOLD
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CALPER’s Corpus Portal
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http://calper.la.psu.edu/corpus_portal/
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Links to GOLD and other corpus-related resources
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