A web-based course in corpus linguistics
Hilde Hasselgård and Jarle Ebeling (Oslo, Norway)
The English department at the University of Oslo is about to offer a web-based course in corpus linguistics for second-year students of English. The course has a double aim: the students are expected to improve their English as well as learning the basics of corpus methods.
Because the course is for students of English (not of computational or general linguistics), there is a bias towards applied linguistics and contrastive linguistics, and the theoretical framework is eclectic. By the time they start the corpus linguistics course the students have already done a one-year academic course in English that includes a fairly comprehensive course in English grammar, so that they can be expected to be familiar with grammatical terminology and analysis. Although the students will learn about corpus compilation and annotation, the focus will be on teaching them to use corpora for linguistic analysis.
We have made two corpora available to the students while they are enrolled in the course: the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus will enable students to work with specific points of difference between English and Norwegian lexis and grammar (see http://www.hf.uio.no/iba/prosjekt/). The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus is, however, rather small (2.6 million words), so that in order to work with certain lexical or collocational patterns, the students need access to a larger corpus. We have chosen to use the Longman/Lancaster English Language Corpus. Both corpora will be made available via the Internet to registered students in the course. They should thus have good opportunity to work with various kinds of research questions that can be answered by studying corpora.
The students will be expected to read a syllabus (Graeme Kennedy’s An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics plus selections from other books and articles) as well as to carry out small corpus investigations themselves. The main pedagogical approach is thus a kind of problem-based learning: the students should learn corpus methods and improve their English while working with the corpora.
The course will start by giving students a practical introduction to how to work with corpora, and a more theoretical introduction to the history of corpus linguistics, and the various types of corpora that exist. The students will then learn about various types of corpus investigations, relating to lexis, collocation, grammar and discourse. All types will be applied to both the monolingual and the bilingual corpus. There will also be a special section devoted to multilingual corpora, to enable students to take advantage of the possibilities offered by such corpora (see also http://www.hf.uio.no/german/sprik/english/). At the end of the course, the students will be expected to show their skills in writing a term paper based on a corpus investigation.
The course (package) includes basic introductions to the topics of study, assignments, discussion groups, chat rooms, and links to corpus tools, dictionaries, and other websites for corpus-linguistics. The course will be delivered on the web using a standard software package.
See further http://www.hf.uio.no/iba/nettkurs