Corpus Linguists!
Would you care to share your favourite paedagogical article / chapter, relating to how to use corpus linguistics to teach a foreign language? I have pieces by O'Keefe, @ElenLeFoll and Mahlberg already, but I'm new to this topic, so all help appreciated. @corpuslinguistics @linguistics #pedagogy #DataDrivenEducation
Too many decades in Japan, but surprised to find that "kawaii" ([Japanese-style] cute, adorable, etc.) has become a loanword in English. Many technical or other English terms that I use are not in the Scrabble Dictionary, but kawaii is. Cuteness is ubiquitous in contemporary Japan, and apparently getting exported. The attached screenshot is from our family LINE group.
I have always advised college students to use Romanized Japanese terms in sentences if there is no English equivalent. This lengthy "List of English words of Japanese origin" would have been handy when I was teaching classes of mixed international and Japanese students. You might also find it of reference or interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Japanese_origin
@mguhlin In Bilingualism classes in Japan, I can require students to show what they have learned from this class, which is based on reliable research, and to discuss their own experiences in summary, reflection, and response papers. In such ways I can discern how much of students' writing is their own thinking and analyzing. Findings from the discipline of bilingualism are dwarfed by the amount of common misconceptions about bilingualism, which would presumably be reflected in AI databases, from blogs and such sources in Japanese, where students find mostly stereotypical, anecdotal, or prejudiced information for papers, despite my warnings to use reliable sources. I am wondering how applicable this approach could be for other subject matter areas.
2/2 Among the limitations are that the English is too much and too difficult for L2 learners in most academic sources, such as journals. When students use automatic translation, they have probably thought about the content in Japanese, but they can paste auto-translated English into papers without fulfilling the language-driven mandate to balance the content-driven approach. I do not believe in content-based EFL as a pretext to mask a language-driven agenda, since the students are enriched by the transferable knowledge they gain in L1 as well as in L2.
Writing reflects thinking, so I discourage writing and speaking that relies on machine translation or AI. The result might be obvious, but we cannot accuse and police students.
My #PhD at Osnabrück University 🇩🇪 was in applied #linguistics/English language teaching and I'm now a postdoc research fellow at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL) at UCLouvain 🇧🇪. I like all things #CorpusLinguistics, #LanguageTeaching & #OpenScience! 🤓
I also work as a freelance conference interpreter (🇫🇷 🇬🇧 🇩🇪), spend far too many hours on trains 🚄 and like tea 🫖, cake 🍰 & emoji! 😇