Skip to main content
News

Designing and using a bilingual writer corpus

By March 1, 2021March 15th, 20212 Comments3 min read4,177 views

Update March 15, 2021: A recording of this lecture is now available on the Language-on-the-Move YouTube channel:

***

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.

A bilingual writer corpus for research on biliteracy

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.

David Palfreyman is the editor of Academic Biliteracies

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

Previous Lecture Series Programs

Language on the Move

Author Language on the Move

More posts by Language on the Move

Join the discussion 2 Comments

Leave a Reply