Welcome to Duane Kindt's Computer Learner Corpus (CLC) webpage.

Here is an preliminary outline of a preliminary corpus project:

We are exploring the use of a corpus of students' spoken English and a native-speaker corpus as tools in discovering what areas of language study student could most benefit from. To do this we are following the procedure listed below:

  1. After practicing, students record a 5-minute conversation with a partner on the theme: "What do you think..."
  2. For homework, the conversation is transcribed and emailed to the teacher without any corrections, except spellchecking. Since our classes are 45 minutes, 3 times a week, one class period was used for transcribing.
  3. As students send their messages, the teacher prints each submission and saves it as a text file.
  4. After the assignment deadline, the teacher pastes all submissions into one file.
  5. The file is then checked for spelling and grammatical errors, the teacher making note of common structural errors or other problems.
  6. MS Word and corpus software are used to compare the students' language and a native-speaker corpus, the results leading to learning materials that focus on those errors.
  7. In the next class meeting, the learning material is given to students.
  8. The original transcription is also given and students look for the errors in question.
  9. Another recording on the same theme is made in the following class.
  10. Repeat numbers 2 through 8.

As the initial stages in building a computer corpus need piloting, what comes of this first project will lead to the shape and purpose of a larger learner corpus.

For more information about CLC and corpus linguistics, follow the links below:

  1. Concordances and Corpora Tutorial (Catherine N. Ball )
  2. Learner Corpus and SLA Research (Yukio Tono)
  3. Corpus Linguistics: table of contents (Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson)
  4. CORPUS RESOURCES
  5. British National Corpus
  6. Mike Scott's Web
  7. Tim Johns Data-driven Learning Page
  8. Corpus Linguistics (Michael Barlow)
  9. Improvising Corpora for ELT: Quick and Dirty ... (Christopher Tribble)
  10. Web Concordancer (Virtual Language Centre)
  11. W3-Corpora
  12. The Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (Sylviane Granger)
  13. Corpus Research at the University of Birmingham
  14. Cobuild Home Page

For more about the AVCR research group and their work with audio and video, follow these links:

  1. Recording conversations
  2. Videoing conversations

Contact:

© Duane Kindt, 2000
Updated: 1/1/03