Symposium: Data-driven learning for languages other than English

A number of recently published meta-analyses and critical reviews provide an overall picture on how Data-driven learning (DDL) is being developed in terms of available resources and empirical findings related to their effectiveness (Boulton & Cobb, 2017; Chen & Flowerdew, 2018; Lee et al., 2018; Mizumoto & Chujo, 2015; Pérez-Paredes, 2019). However, one aspect emerging quite clearly from these studies is that the vast majority of them focuses on DDL for English as a second/foreign language learning, with very limited attention devoted to DDL resources and evidence related to other languages. In line with this year’s EuroCALL conference theme, “CALL for widening participation”, the CorpusCALL SIG proposes a Symposium aiming to widen the scope by putting DDL research in languages other than English into the spotlight. The Symposium aims to gather researchers and teachers working on DDL for languages other than English, share experiences and practices, and start charting the broader territory within which DDL is currently developing. The Symposium comprises papers focusing on four languages. In the first paper, by Nina Vyatkina, a brief overview of what corpus resources have been used for teaching and learning German will be presented, as well as the effectiveness of these applications; directions for future resource development and empirical research are also outlined. The second paper, by Eva Schaeffer-Lacroix and Isabelle Salengros Iguenane, examines how corpora can be used in L2 French professional writing courses, by creating contextualised learning tasks based on queries applied to a specialised corpus. The third paper, by Magdalena Abad Castelló, provides an overview of studies and experiences of Spanish teachers with corpora, including a presentation of a small survey of teachers of Spanish as a foreign language in the United Kingdom, and illustrating some concrete examples of the use of language corpus in the Spanish L2 class. In the final paper, a brief outline of studies based on DDL will be provided, followed by a description of the main findings of a specific case study for teaching Italian and a discussion of its implications in terms of the desirable future developments. The theme of the Symposium will be complemented by a poster by the Chair and the Secretary of the CorpusCALL SIG, aimed at providing an overview of what is available in the published DDL literature on languages other than English. ReferencesBoulton, A., & Cobb, T. (2017). Corpus use in language learning: A meta-analysis. Language Learning, 67(2), 348–393.Chen, M., & Flowerdew, J. (2018). A critical review of research and practice in data-driven learning (DDL) in the academic writing classroom. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 23(3), 335–369. Lee, H., Warschauer, M., & Lee, J. H. (2018). The Effects of Corpus Use on Second Language Vocabulary Learning: A Multilevel Meta-analysis. Applied Linguistics, 40(5), 721–753.Mizumoto, A., & Chujo, K. (2015). A Meta-analysis of Data-driven Learning Approach in the Japanese EFL Classroom. English Corpus Studies, 22, 1–18.Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). A systematic review of the uses and spread of corpora and data-driven learning in CALL research during 2011–2015. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 1–26.