Corpus-based language education in Chinese context

1. Corpus-based language education in Chinese context Richard Xiao

2. Corpus revolution in language teaching • An increasing interest since the early 1990s in applying the findings of corpus-based research to language pedagogy • 10 well-received biennial international conferences Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC, 1994-2012) • At least 30 authored or edited books on using corpora in language education • Corpus analysis can be illuminating “in virtually all branches of linguistics or language learning” (Leech 1997: 9) University of Leeds

3. Corpus revolution in language teaching • Three focuses of the convergence (Leech 1997) • Indirect use of corpora in teaching (e.g. reference publishing, materials development, language testing, and teacher training) • Direct use of corpora in teaching (e.g. teaching about, teaching to exploit, and exploiting to teach) • Development of teaching-oriented corpora (e.g. LSP and learner corpora) University of Leeds

4. Corpus revolution in language teaching • While indirect uses of corpora in teaching seem well established, direct uses of corpora in teaching have so far been confined largely to learning at more advanced levels, especially in tertiary education • Almost absent in general classroom, e.g. secondary education (and in the teaching of other foreign languages at all levels) • Learners’ age, level and experience • Time constraints and curricular requirements • Knowledge and skills required of teachers for corpus analysis and pedagogical mediation • Access to appropriate resources such as corpora and tools • …or indeed probably a combination of all of these factors University of Leeds

5. Using corpora in Chinese teaching • While the corpus-based approach has achieved a significant impact on English pedagogy over the past two decades, corpora have not made much of an inroad into Chinese language teaching • Focusing on four applications of corpora in Chinese teaching and learning • Syllabus design and materials development • Explicating patterns of language use • Classroom concordancing and self access study • Interlanguage and SLA research University of Leeds

6. Syllabus design and materials development • The most readily available data from a corpus is frequency, which plays an important role in helping to determine teaching priorities in language education • “Whatever the imperfections of the simple equation ‘most frequent’ = ‘most important to learn’, it is difficult to deny that frequency information derived from large collections of text (corpora) has an important empirical input to language learning materials.” (Leech 1997:16) University of Leeds

7. Syllabus design and materials development • Because of the large inventory of characters in Chinese (ca. 80,000), there has been a long tradition of teaching Chinese characters on the basis of frequency, though the research of word frequency on the basis of large collections of text only became possible in the 1990s with the advent of more powerful computers and specialised computer software for word segmentation • There are at least a dozen frequency lists or dictionaries of Chinese characters and words University of Leeds

8. Syllabus design and materials development • (1928)語體文應用字彙(The Applied Glossary of Modern Chinese) • (1973) Frequency Dictionary of Chinese Words • (1976) 現代漢字綜合使用頻度表 (A Comprehensive Frequency Table of Character Usage in Modern Chinese) • (1985) 現代漢語用字頻度表(A Frequency Table of Character Usage in Modern Chinese) • (1986) 現代漢語頻率詞典 (A Frequency Dictionary of Modern Chinese) • (1988) 現代漢語常用字表 (Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese) • (1991-1997) 中國大陸、臺灣、香港漢語詞庫(A Chinese Word Bank from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) • (2009) A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: Core vocabulary for learners University of Leeds

9. Syllabus design and materials development HSK Syllabus of Graded Words and Characters for Chinese Proficiency (2001) University of Leeds

10. Syllabus design and materials development • CALPER Chinese project “Teaching Advanced Chinese with Authentic Materials” led by Hongyin Tao • Working with Spoken Chinese (2007-2010) • Developing 10 units of publicly available online teaching and learning materials for high-intermediate and advanced learners of Chinese based on 60 hours of authentic conversational interactions with a wide range of topics in a variety of communicative settings • http://calper.la.psu.edu/chinese/index.php • Video Materials for Advanced Chinese Listening Comprehension (2010-2014) • Aiming to create a collection of 100+ video segments of natural interactions with supporting listening comprehension materials for Mandarin Chinese University of Leeds

11. Explicating patterns of language use • Corpora can help language teachers to discover and explicate intuitively implicit patterns of language use • Common types of errors with ba-constructions in the HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus • Ba-construction is used with a verb without a disposal meaning (e.g. *我这么大了，应该把自己作主了。) • Ba construction is not used when it should (e.g. *我现在写出来我的经历{CC经验}。) • Ba-construction is used with a bare (monosyllabic) verb (e.g. *因此，我们必须把安乐死和故意杀人区别。) • Ba-construction is used with an indefinite object (e.g. *把一本词典递给我。) University of Leeds

12. Explicating patterns of language use • The first two types of errors can best be avoided by explicit instructions by telling students types of verbs not used in ba-constructions • Verbs of perception and cognition: 看见, 听见, 感到, 感觉, 觉得, 以为, 认为, 知道, 懂, etc • Verbs of existence and identification: 有, 在, 是, 不如, 等于, 像 etc • Psychological verbs: 同意, 讨厌, 生气, 关心, 怕, 愿意 etc • Posture verbs: 站, 坐, 躺, 蹲, 趴, 跪 etc • Motion verbs: 来, 去, 上, 下, 起来, 过去 etc • Also important to let students know that the use of ba-construction is mandatory rather than optional (Jin 1997): *我种花在阳台上 vs. 我把花种在阳台上 University of Leeds

13. Explicating patterns of language use • The third type of errors will be better avoided by exposing learners to authentic data so that they can see the patterns of actual language use based on their perceptual experience: bare verbs rarely occur in ba-constructions • Patterns of co-occurrence of ba in native Chinese corpora • Directional complements; resultative complements; 得 complements; quantifying complements; aspect marker 了/着; verb reduplication; benefactive给与 structures; adverbials • The perceptual experience with exposure to patterns in a large amount of attested language data will help learners to develop linguistic awareness University of Leeds

14. Explicating patterns of language use • The fourth type of errors relates to specificity of object • Textbooks often instruct learners to avoid usingan indefinite form (e.g. 一个) to modify the object of ba: *把一本词典递给我 • However, such structures are not uncommon in attested language use • The definite vs. indefinite distinction is borrowed from English grammar, while Chinese is not an inflectional language , where semantic meaning is more important than form • Semantically, the object of baalways has a specific rather than generic reference • A noun modified by indefinite form can have specific reference (already known to speaker and hearer; made specific by a modifier) • Pragmatically, ba constructions with an indefinite form are typically in narratives rather than in imperatives • Ba-constructions are essentially descriptive University of Leeds

15. University of Leeds

16. Classroom concordancing & self access study • Data-driven discovery learning for more advanced learners • Pedagogical mediation (e.g. using edited concordance lines) is important for learners at a lower proficiency level • Illustrative examples of language functions for making apologies • 对不起, 抱歉, 不好意思 University of Leeds

17. Classroom concordancing & self access study • All can be used to make apologies: 抱歉/对不起/不好意思，我来晚了, but they are also different • Meaning: (Strong) 抱歉>对不起>不好意思 (weak) • Style: (Formal) 抱歉>对不起/不好意思 (informal) • Grammatical function • 对不起: can take an object • 抱歉: typically functions as an adverbial modifier • 不好意思 : typically used as an adjective • Students will be encouraged to explore spoken and written corpora, or be shown concordances extracted from corpora to help them develop a perceptual knowledge • Teachers can also use concordances to develop exercises for learners in their independent self-access study University of Leeds

18. Interlanguage and SLA research • At present, interlanguage analysis of learner errors appears to be the focus of corpus-based Chinese teaching and learning, but there are various issues with Chinese interlanguage research • Very few existing Chinese interlanguage corpora in comparison with learner English corpora • Rather small corpus size in comparison with general corpora • Biased towards to Asian learners: Korean, Japanese and Southeast Asian learners • Mostly compositions under test conditions • Lack of spoken data • Consistency in manual error tagging • Public availability • Interlanguage research focusing on or confined to error analysis while overlooking interlanguage usage patterns University of Leeds

19. Interlanguage and SLA research • Case study of native English learners’ acquisition of Chinese passives, comparing bei passives in L1 learners’ Chinese interlanguage and L1 Chinese learner data • Native English (FLOB) • L1 English (HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus: learners from Britain, US, Canada, Australia) • L1 Chinese (HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus: learners whose L1 is Chinese, i.e. Chinese descendents) • Native Chinese (LCMC) • Features under consideration for demonstration • Frequency of use • Long versus short form • Pragmatic meanings University of Leeds

20. Frequency of use (per 10K words) University of Leeds

21. Long vs. short passives University of Leeds

22. Pragmatic meanings University of Leeds

23. Interlanguage and SLA research • Native English learners tend to overuse passives in their Chinese interlanguage • They show a strong preference for short passives • While short passives per se are not errors, the underuse of long passives in their interlanguage is a deviation from the native norm of passive use in Chinese • Another deviation from the native Chinese norm is that English learners’ beipassives are predominantly neutral in pragmatic meaning University of Leeds

24. Conclusion • In conclusion, I will discuss the strategies for promoting corpus-based language pedagogy in the future • Currently, corpora have played a more important role in helping to decide what to teach (i.e. indirect uses) than how to teach (i.e. direct uses) • Indirect uses of corpora seem to be well established in English language teaching though they have just started to make inroad in Chinese teaching and learning • Direct uses of corpora are largely confined to English language teaching in tertiary education and are nearly absent in general language classroom such as secondary schools and in teaching other languages including Chinese University of Leeds

25. Conclusion • If corpora are to be further popularised to more general language teaching context, there are two priorities in near future • Corpus linguists must create and facilitate access to corpora that are pedagogically motivated, in both design and content, to meet pedagogical needs and curricular requirements so that corpus-based learning activities become an integral part, rather than an additional option, of the overall language curriculum • Teachers should be provided, through pre-service training or continued professional development, with the required knowledge and skills for corpus analysis and pedagogical mediation of corpus-based learning activities • As Chinese teaching has just started to make use of corpora, there is a lot to be learned from research of corpus-based English pedagogy over the past two decades University of Leeds

26. Thank you! z.xiao@lancaster.ac.uk University of Leeds