Update March 15, 2021: A recording of this lecture is now available on the Language-on-the-Move YouTube channel:
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After a pandemic-induced interruption, our Lectures in Linguistic Diversity are back as an occasional series within the Departmental Seminars of the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University. First one up in 2021 is Professor David Palfreyman with a lecture about “Designing and using a bilingual writer corpus”.
Date: Friday, March 05, 2021
Time: 3pm Sydney time, AEDT (=8am Dubai time)
Venue: Anywhere on Zoom. Click here to join.
Abstract: The language corpus (a large, structured collection of authentic language texts) has become a valuable resource for research on language. Corpora offer large, representative samples of ‘real world’ language use, which can be searched for examples of words or constructions; they are often enriched with annotations so that they can be searched for more underlying meanings or structures, errors or other features. However, language corpora have until very recently not been prepared with a focus on biliteracy. Instead, they have tended to focus on a single language; even research on learner corpora of writing in English (or in another language) tends to compare this writing with a reference corpus of writing by other, ‘native’ users of the same language.
This talk will discuss the potential of a new type of corpus: the bilingual writer corpus, which focuses instead on a large set of bilingual writers writing in both their languages. Unlike a ‘parallel corpus’ (which pairs texts in one language with translations of those same texts into another language), the bilingual writer corpus matches comparable texts in different languages written by the same writer on different occasions.
One of the first examples of a bilingual writer corpus is the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC), developed by David Palfreyman, Zayed University, and Nizar Habash, New York University Abu Dhabi. This presentation explains some of the principles of design and methodology for the corpus, and some of the possibilities for research using ZAEBUC and bi/multilingual corpora more generally.
Presenter bio: Dr. David M. Palfreyman is a Professor in the Language Studies Department at Zayed University, United Arab Emirates. His background is in language teaching, teacher education and socio-cultural contexts of language use and learning. He is the author of several well-cited publications relating to learner autonomy, and lead editor of the books Learner Autonomy Across Cultures (Palgrave); Learning and Teaching Across Cultures in Higher Education (Palgrave); and Academic Biliteracies (Multilingual Matters). He is also founding editor of the journal Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Gulf Perspectives.
Reports about previous Lectures in Linguistic Diversity
- How to teach TESOL ethically in an English-dominant world
- What can Australian Message Sticks teach us about literacy?
- Bilingual children in preschool
- Secrets of bilingual parenting success
- Asylum interviews as linguistic conflict zones
- Are bilinguals better language learners?
- What do migrant parents expect from schools?
- Bilingual children refusing to speak the home language
- How can we change language habits?
Previous Lecture Series Programs
- Chats in Linguistic Diversity (an occasional podcast we started in 2020)
- Lecture in Linguistic Diversity 2020 (before the virus put a stop to them)
- Lectures in Linguistic Diversity 2019, Term 2
- Lectures in Linguistic Diversity 2019, Term 1
- Lectures in Linguistic Diversity 2018
Very in interesting ideas