New special issue on corpus linguistics and education, by Monika Bednarek, Peter Crosthwaite and Alex García

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We are very pleased to announce the publication of a special issue of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics on “Corpus Linguistics and Education in Australia”, guest edited by Alex García, Peter Crosthwaite, and Monika Bednarek.

The issue involves Sydney Corpus Lab members and affiliates as editors and authors:

In ‘Ten years of print media coverage of NAPLAN: A corpus-assisted assessment’, Nicole Mockler examines the print media coverage of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test, tracking how public perception of NAPLAN has evolved over its first decade. This is the first study to use corpus tools and techniques to analyze media representation of the NAPLAN test, allowing her to examine almost 6,000 news reports, over 10 times the number of articles of previous studies. Her diachronic analysis of key words in such a representative sample provides compelling evidence of her claim of shift in the representation of education, making it more akin to a market commodity than a ‘common good’.

In ‘Examining sex education in a corpus of magazine advice columns’, the focus shifts from discourses about education to educational discourses, albeit outside of the formal education system. Georgia Carr studies a corpus of advice columns from Dolly – an Australian magazine targeted at teenage girls – as an informal source of sex education. By selecting two time periods two decades apart (1990s and 2010s), she is able to establish a contrast between the level of concern with normality among Dolly’s readers in each period. This study focuses on an area – the concern with normality among adolescents – which is largely under researched. By including Dolly’s readers’ questions, the study hints at how the discourse of normality is not only produced but also perceived and, possibly, adopted by readers.

In ‘Taking DDL online – Designing, implementing and evaluating a SPOC on data-driven learning for tertiary L2 writing’, Peter Crosthwaite describes the process and the challenges of implementing a short private online course (SPOC) based on Data-Driven Learning (DDL) for error correction in academic writing, showing how corpus resources can benefit both L1 and L2 speakers. Crosthwaite demonstrates how students can learn to swap their dictionaries for online corpus tools, reports on students’ perceptions of course effectiveness, and identifies challenges and potential solutions for independent online training in DDL.

The final article, by Martin Schweinberger, is titled ‘How Learner Corpus Research can inform language learning and teaching – An analysis of adjective amplification among L1 and L2 English speakers’. In this study, the author uses advanced statistical modelling to contrast the use of amplifiers (e.g., ‘very’, ‘quite’) between L1 and L2 speakers. By using already available corpora, Schweinberger provides a model of research of differences between L1 and L2 speakers that can be easily adapted to other linguistic features. It also suggests an approach to evidence-based language teaching that can identify and address specific difficulties experienced by language learners.

The special issue also includes an introduction by the guest editors, situating the area of corpus linguistics and education in the Australian research context, and also contains Hien Hoang’s review of Laurence Anthony’s recent book Introducing English for Specific Purposes.

We hope that this issue of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics will raise the profile of recent Australian-led developments in this area, while serving as a call for action for further corpus linguistics research, funding and innovation within the Australian context. The articles presented in this special issue represent both established and up-and-coming Australian-based corpus linguists, and represent a snapshot of ongoing directions for Australian education-focused work in corpus linguistics.