Transcript Ecuadorian English Learner Corpus

Anna M. Gates, Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja, ECUADOR
ECUADORIAN ENGLISH LEARNER
CORPUS
Introduction
 Ecuador
 Population: 14,573,101
 Academic requirement
 High school (X weekly)
 University (approx. 320 hours)
 No publically or academically available learner
corpora Ecuadorian learners of English.
 Commercial corpora represent Ecuadorian
learners with a mere 117,100 words
 Little linguistic research, no corpus research
Universidad Tecnica Particular
de Loja
 28,000 students nationwide in distance
education
 English teacher training program
 1,200 students in distance program
 60 students on site
 Faculty: 23 Ecuadorians, 4 foreign
 Membership in English teacher association
Ecuadorian English Learner
Corpus (EELC) Design
 Objectives
 Comparable with the Spanish subcorpora of the
International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE)
 Representative of the distinct geographical
regions of Ecuador.
EELC Methods
 Creation of candidate database
 Proficient to advanced English learners
 English teaching majors in their final year of study
 English major alumni
 Current practicing English teachers
 Individuals with interest in joining a Master degree
program in teaching English as a foreign language.
Determining Proficiency
 Collection of demographic information
 Duration and quality of English language exposure
 Writing samples
Data Collection
June 2010
 Candidates sent an online survey (Lime
Survey)
 Demographic information
 Request for an argumentative essay (700 and 1000
words)
To improve response rates, candidates were offered
an incentive for their participation. This method
was chosen to minimize data collection costs and
to reach a wide geographical range within
Ecuador.
The Corpus
 Software
 AntConc 3.2.1
 Concordancer
 Word and keyword frequency generators
 Tools for cluster and lexical bundle analysis
 Word distribution plot,
 Support for regular expressions
 Freeware
 CLAWS4 POS-tagger
 High rate of accuracy
 Robustness
 Advantage for making comparative analysis with other
corpora tagged with CLAWS4.
•279 Lime Survey invitations made
•24 (8,6%) responses to the survey
•19 (6,81%) complete
•5 (1.79) only partial
Complete responses
Partical responses
Invitations sent
Total Responses
RESULTS CONTINUED
• Words Collected
• GOAL: 250,000
• Collected to date: 8060
Goal
Collected to date
Alternative strategies
 Current students
 Request professor assistence
 Extra credit points
 English Teachers
 Participation in national conferences
 Dedicated meeting
 Others
 Site partners
 Promotional campaign
Proposed Projects
 Collocation analysis
 Preposition use
 Study of register in immigrant returnees
Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja
Ecuadorian English Learner Corpus
ANNA M. GATES ([email protected])
NICK IZQUIERDO ([email protected])