Applying Corpus Linguistics to Enhance Disciplinary Literacy at Secondary School
Time: 1.30 -4.30, 18th January 2019 Venue: The University of Languages and International Studies, 2 Pham Van Dong Road, Cau Giay, Xuan Thuy, Ha Noi
Presenter: Dr Clarence Green, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
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Abstract:
Disciplinary Literacy is a research area and pedagogical approach in secondary education that focusses on developing awareness in learners of linguistic variation across disciplines. It is an approach being adopted by educational systems worldwide (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2017). In this talk I will share my recent research that has, for the first time, used Corpus Linguistics (an applied natural language processing subfield of the digital humanities) to enhance the disciplinary literacy of secondary students. I will report on a large corpus project that has built a 16.5 million word corpus of current secondary school textbooks representing eight disciplines: biology, chemistry, economics, English, geography, history, mathematics and physics. From this data, my project team and I extracted the discipline-specific vocabulary and phraseology that provide conceptual access to a discipline, employing a range of state-of-the-art corpus methods. The research has resulted in the Secondary Vocabulary Lists and the Secondary Phrase Lists, which are now publicly available for teachers, students and curriculum developers locally and internationally. Going beyond previous corpus-derived wordlists such as the AWL (Coxhead, 2000) and the AVL (Gardner & Davies, 2014), we simultaneously developed collocational and word family lists for each discipline. The final vocabulary resources represent an extensive set of core lexical items that need to be mastered by students to read successfully in a secondary school subject and constitute a new, innovative resource to assist in the development of disciplinary literacy.
Biographical statement:
Dr Clarence Green currently lectures in Psycholinguistics, Corpus Linguistics and Research Methods at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. He holds a PhD in linguistics (University of Melbourne) and his research interests include the cognitive psychology of language, corpus linguistics, disciplinary literacy, literary stylistics and cognitive-functional grammar. His research has appeared in journals such as Cognitive Linguistics, Language and Literature, English for Specific Purposes, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Functions of Language, and Literary and Linguistic Computing. His recent book, Patterns and Development in the English Clause System (2017), is an examination of English clause grammar from a usage-based linguistics perspective.
His current psycholinguistic research explores how the forms and functions of language interact with other cognitive domains, particularly working memory, and his corpus research involves using corpora to explore the language of academic disciplines, including literature, and produce pedagogical resources for enhancing disciplinary literacy.
Affiliation: National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. NIE3-03-118, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore 637616. Tel: (65) 6790-3386. Email: clarence.green@nie.edu.sg
