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Tom Cobbcobb.tom@uqam.ca Université du Québec à Montréal Didactique Des Langues

DDL for French learners: A resource wish-list

8-10 Sept 2011Association for French Language StudiesColloque annuel - Nancy

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OR – What we’ve got + what we still need

to make DDL 1.0 in French

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Some personal stuffIs my presence here a bit fraudulent?

> Not a corpus linguist> Not a French linguist or teacher> Not «au courant » about French educ.

Not a v. good French speaker

Just an applied linguist with amateur programming ability and a belief that corpus is a useful tool in learning and teaching

- Whose class notes became a best-seller- Whose class website became must-click

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A huge pile of tutorial & language analysis tools

> But at least all in one place> And do not require “administrative

privileges” to access in a lab> Works on most of the various browser x

platform combinations

Trying to keep it all together is like riding a whirlwindBut one does make an effort…

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So, good « concordanciers » all,

We instantly extract the pattern :

1. Pretty much a Nordic sport

2. When Europe sleeps> N. America lextutors

3. China never sleeps

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But what do all those energetic folks “do” on Lextutor?

Site Stats are pretty bareBut we get some idea

from their itineraries

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> Some of it random> Some of it inexplicable> Some of it makes sense

So we combine the well motivated, well-worn paths

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My only experience of French education was…

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Young Americans at the Sorbonne learned…

le subjonctif du passé historique<< que j’eusse >> … etc

… who could not order breakfast… who did not know 300 basic words… who had never said or understood a full

sentence

A STRONG ARGUMENT FOR SOME

“COMMUNICATIVE METHOD”! + some small awareness of frequency

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But as we now know…COMMUNICATIVE METHOD had its own problems

Top end:> Tendency to plateau

Lower end:> Missing HF vocab + verb tenses> Non-grammaticized multiword units> No sense of “language as object”

ENTER FOCUS ON FORM and LANGUAGE AWARENESS

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I have always wondered why…

TEXT COMPUTING + FonF / LA have not seemed a more obvious link

The computer since about 2005

- commandeered as “just another means of communication”

With all the limitations of the earlier communicative era?

My job has become to make and sell this link

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Some underlying assumptions

Much interesting research in applied linguistics makes extensive use of a language technology

Few learners at any level will have any major experience of this

Most language technologies used in research are never “pedagogicalized”

Many easily could be

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Some underlying assumptions (2)Many interesting language technologies

are hard to get your hands on

Most can be reverse engineered

A corpus is not just something techy to keep the stronger students busy

Rather it is a necessary tool in SLA

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Some underlying assumptions (3)Unless Chomsky was right

Language acquisition depends on inputAt least in L2 for post-adolescents

But patterns in natural input are- fragmentary, distributed, imperceptible

Requiring 15 years - to form via osmosis

Successful SLA can only occur- with some sort of data assembly + compression

The best form of this is ~ a corpus + way to query it (concordance)

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Some underlying assumptions (4)But a pedagogical corpus is not necessarily the same

as the computational linguist’s

Corpus as a learning tool ~Need not be enormous

As in language pedagogy generally, “Do more with less”WITH PROGRAMMING + IMAGINATION + USER fB

Need not be taggedIt’s the learner’s task to parse surface structure input

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Some underlying assumptions (4)

Corpus as a learning tool ~

Need not follow a sampling principleFrequency may be more useful

(“This corpus is 95% first thousand level words…”)Or “Our Course Materials” Or “The words of a Author X” etc

Need not pass through the education establishmentWith the Web can reach learners directly

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Some underlying assumptions (5)

Corpus as a learning tool ~

Is probably the only ground between the extremes of Hot Potatoes exercises and pricey R+D in “intelligent” iCALL …

that can serve as a framework for interesting, practical, real-world CALL development

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Some underlying assumptions (6)

Corpus as a learning tool ~

Is probably the only way of developing a truly multilingual CALL

Just a question of finding or making comparable corpora in different languages

- and passing them through the samealgorithms

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Is there any proof for any of this?

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Some research findings for pedagogical concordancing

Deep vocabulary knowledge can result from multi-contextual encounters with words in a concordancing activity

Breadth & depth of vocabulary learning can be reconciled with concordancing

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Some research findings for pedagogical concordancing (2)

A plausible case for constructivism can be constructed within a DDL/ concordancing framework

The value of collaborative learning in SLA can be shown in co-constructed learner concordances

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Some research findings for pedagogical concordancing (3)

Concordance feedback to learner writing via embedded links (a) works well, (b) helps some learners, ( c) hurts none

Many functions of an NS “reading buddy” can be realized by “resource-assisted reading” esp. text-linked concordancing

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Some research findings for pedagogical concordancing (4)

…the reading buddy

AND, LINKED TO GOOGLE BOOKS, CAN DELIVER “THE TEACHER WITH THE TEXT” so that African universities need not build $$$ libraries $$$

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BUT the multi-languages idea?

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What can we do for our learners with all these corpora?

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So what else is needed for a French DDL?

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Wish List 1 A resident 3-5 million word general French corpus

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Some of this may be a “familization” problem

The word exists in a 1 million word corpus, just not in a particular form

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Following Nation’s heroic cracking of the 100 million-word BNC into 14 k-family units…

Many things became possible on Lextutor

Especially with smallish corpora

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71From Wang & Nation (2004), based on Bauer & Nation (1993)

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1k 80.17%2k 5.65%AWL 1.68%

Off 12.50%

GSL + AWL

BNC LISTS (N, 2006)

BNC +proper noun

auto-extract (C+L, 09)

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Wish List 2. A complete, familized

French frequency list from a big corpus

Or at least lemmatized

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With such a list we can offer learners…

A summary of the whole lexicon of a language

+ a plan for getting acquainted with it

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Of course, for learning basic vocabulary items

(1k, 2k, 3k)Contextual learning from a “real” will not work

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Build comprehensible corpus

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Wish List 3. Graded French corpora

Of at least 1 million words

Ideally at 1k, 2k, 3k levelsSo we can say,

“For this learner, 95% of items in this corpus are

comprehensible”

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And… so far all this only deals with

individual words

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Some Multi-Word Units independent, non-compositional meaning

are so frequent that… they are actually 1st and 2nd 1000 items

E.g., learners will meet “of course” More frequently than 2k item “window”

505 of these belong in the most frequent 5,000 (>10%) Schmitt & Alvarez, Nottingham

However… We have now discovered

*the V.H.F Multi-Word*

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Wish List 4. A list of the VHF idiomatic

multi-words in French(to incorporate in Wish-List item 3)

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And when all that is done ~The frequency list can be

adjusted for homographs

« Les poules du couvent couvent » « Tu as l’as de pique » « Les vers marchent versAvignon »

A combined frequency rating based on word form?

English wish list contextually sensitive word lists (DDL 2.0)

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Wish List Résumé1. A mid-size general corpus of French for DDL web work (3 million-ish)

2. A graded corpus for DDL web work

3. A complete, familized frequency list from a big corpus

4. Identification of HF multiwords for eventual inclusion in 3

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Suite…Software

lextutor.ca/

Paperslextutor.ca/cv/

Anything else> Find me here> Write me at

cobb.tom@uqam.ca

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Technology and Language Testing

Corpus-Based Testing Parallel Concordancing Analyzing Speech Corpora Concordancing Language Teacher Training

in Technology Language Trainer Training

in Technology Technology and Listening Computer-Assisted

Language Learning Effectiveness Research

Learner Modeling in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning

Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning

Natural Language Processing in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning

Learner Corpora Automated Speech Recognition Technology and Discourse

Intonation Computer-Assisted Vocabulary

Load Analysis Technology and Usage-Based

Teaching Applications Information Retrieval for

Reading Tutors Online Communities of Practice Emerging Technologies for

Language Learning Lexical Bundles Technology and Phrases Technology and Teaching

Writing Latent Semantic Analysis

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Mobile Assisted Language Learning

Technology and Phonetics Computer-Mediated

Communication and Second Language Use

Computer-Mediated Communication and Second Language Development

Multimodal Computer-Mediated Communication and Distance Education

Distance Language Learning Massively Multiplayer Online

Games Digital Divide Technology and Teaching

Vocabulary Exporting Applied Linguistics

Technology Monolingual Lexicography Bilingual Lexicography Lexicography Across Languages Internet and World English

Searchlinguistics Internationalization and

Localization Translation Terminology Technology and Literacy Corpora and Literature Keyword Analysis Connectionism Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Development Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Research Lexical Priming Technology and Culture Computer-Assisted

Language Learning and Machine Translation