A short private online course for all

Corpus linguistics offers the opportunity to draw informed, objective, data-driven conclusions about the type and frequency of linguistic features that occur together, occur often and occur in specific contexts – information particularly important for the purposes of teaching and learning. In particular the use of corpora for ‘data-driven learning’, which involves direct learner engagement with corpus data where users act as “language detectives”, with “every student a Sherlock Holmes” (Johns, 1997:101) is rapidly gaining credibility as a viable and important modern digital approach to language learning.

However, while DDL is now used in many educational contexts in Europe, the United States and Asia, there has been little previous activity in this area within the Australian context. Well, if the world won’t come to us, then we have to bring DDL to the world. This is exactly the logic behind the creation of ‘Improving Writing Through Corpora’, a new fully-online course that provides basic training in corpus consultation for DDL, using the powerful SketchEngine corpus query platform with activities designed around the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE). This course aims to provide users with the tools, knowledge and skills to become a ‘language detective’ themselves. Participants can search for examples of language in use across different disciplines, like engineering, the arts, physics, and so on, ensuring we can use the right terminology for the subjects we are writing. By completing this course, one can become an expert at manipulating millions of words of academic writing data to provide all the answers you need to many problems you might be having with your writing, and boost your knowledge of academic words and phrases to improve your vocabulary and written fluency.

The course is now live at https://edge.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UQx+SLATx+2019/about and is open to both students, teachers and researchers internationally. I’m particularly interested in teacher trainers who may wish to use this course as part of DDL for training for pre- / in-service teachers at the primary or secondary levels of education. Already visitors from 32 different countries are onboard – so come along and give it a go for yourself!

Reference
Johns, T. F. (1997). Contexts: The background, development and trialling of a concordance-based CALL program. In A. Wichmann, S. Fligelstone, T. McEnery, & G. Knowles (Eds.), Teaching and language corpora (pp. 100–115). London, UK: Longman.