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The British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) organized a workshop on Data-Driven Learning on 8 June 2018 at Coventry University. At the workshop, Martin Wynne gave an introduction to CLARIN, and distributed fliers. There were 44 people in attendance. |
At the workshop, the participants presented a lot of build-your-own and do-it-yourself corpus work, where either teachers make a corpus of specialized language, as a source of examples, or advanced students make their own as a research project – for instance, Maggie Charles from the University of Oxford gave a talk titled Starting out with DDL: How do students use their own do-it-yourself corpus. Many of the participants teach academic writing to non-native speakers, so reference corpora that are available through CLARIN nodes, such as the British Academic Written English Corpus, could be particularly valuable for them. The participants of the workshop explained how standard corpus interfaces are not adequate for students and non-linguists. Most of the presented projects involved some form of re-presenting corpus data in more easily digestible forms.
Other talks included Using DDL to support students writing in unfamiliar genres (Megan Bruce, Durham University), Scaling up DDL: Challenges of bringing DDL to an online SPOC format (Peter Crosthwaite, University of Queensland), New directions in DDL for EAP writers (Ana Frankenberg-Garcia and colleagues), Enhancing Self-Directed Language Learning through Corpus Linguistics: The Proactive Engagement of the Learner (Antonio Verolino, University of Pavia), Affordable Language Gain? Data-Driven Learning for lower-level ESL Learners: A Mixed-Method Study in Southern China (Xin Xu, Cambridge University), and The BAWE Quicklinks Project (Hilary Nesi and Benet Vincent Coventry University).