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Language Teachers Working with Text: Increasing Target Language Awareness of Student Teachers with Do-It-Yourself Corpus Research

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Book cover Working with Text and Around Text in Foreign Language Environments

Part of the book series: Second Language Learning and Teaching ((SLLT))

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Abstract

With language awareness already established as a key concept in language learner and teacher education, ways need to be found to foster language awareness of prospective teachers. It goes without saying that without teacher autonomy and control over the foreign language it is impossible to effectively develop learner autonomy. The present paper reports a study investigating the viability of teacher corpus self-compilation and quiz authoring as a vehicle for developing their target language awareness. In particular, detailed discussions of instructional procedure and learning environments can be found in the article. The study shows how student teachers are trained to work with texts: finding, evaluating, selecting, compiling into a corpus, and analysing and extracting examples into a quiz authoring tool.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an overview of the British Language Awareness Movement, cf. Hawkins (1992) and Piechurska-Kuciel (2005). See also Svalberg (2007) for a state-of-the-art article reviewing 20 years of LA in FL education.

  2. 2.

    See Geoghegan (1994) for a detailed description and characteristics of these particular adopter categories.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland

    Jarosław Krajka

Authors
  1. Jarosław Krajka
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jarosław Krajka .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland

    Halina Chodkiewicz

  2. John Paul II Catholic University of Lubl, Lublin, Poland

    Piotr Steinbrich

  3. Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland

    Małgorzata Krzemińska-Adamek

Appendix 1. A Comparative Review of Selected Concordancing Programs (quoted after Krajka, 2007, pp. 50–52)

Appendix 1. A Comparative Review of Selected Concordancing Programs (quoted after Krajka, 2007, pp. 50–52)

 

TextSTAT

Simple Concordance Program

AntConc

Availability

Price

Free

Free

Free

Downloaded from the web

Yes

Yes

Yes

Licence

Freeware

Freeware

Freeware

Upgrade

Yes

Yes

Yes

Operating systems

Windows XP/7

Mac OS 10

Linux (when equipped with Python)

Windows 95+

Mac OS 10

Windows 98+,

Mac OS 10.4.5,

Vine Linux

PC/Mac versions

PC and Mac

PC and Mac

PC and Mac

Internet access

Yes (to retrieve websites for a corpus)

No

No

Interface language

English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Galician, Finnish, Polish, Czech

English

English

Technical criteria

Hardware requirements

Standard

Standard

Standard

Installation

No installation (unzipping only)

Easy

No installation

Reliability of operation

Yes

Yes

Yes

Navigation

Clear

Clear

Medium

User support systems

Link to a website with examples of regular expressions

Standard Windows help

No help

Interface transparency

Yes

Medium

Medium

Icons

Non-standard icons

Transparent but few icons

No icons, menu items instead

Encoding

All systems

No information

All systems

Corpus compilation

Filetypes supported

doc, sxw, txt, html

ans, asc, txt

txt, html, htm, xml

Corpus compiled into one file

No

No

No

Retrieving Internet websites to a corpus

Yes

No

No

Retrieving discussion group posts to a corpus

Yes

No

No

Removing selected files from a corpus

Yes

Yes

Yes

Searching procedures

Keyword search

Yes

Yes

Yes

Associated words search

Yes

No

Yes

Available number of associated words

1

0

Unlimited

Wildcards use in search

Yes

No

Yes

Case-sensitive search

Yes

No

Yes

Regular expressions search

Yes

No

Yes

Part of word search (prefix, suffix search)

No

Yes

Only prefix

Specifying keyword-associated word distance

Yes

No

Yes

Concordance output

KWIC (key word in context) display

Yes

Yes

Yes

Keyword gapped display

No

No

No

Exporting concordance list as a file

Yes (txt, doc)

No

Yes (txt)

Exporting frequency list as a file

Yes (csv, xls)

No

No

Displaying results with reference to the source file

Yes

No

Yes

Displaying full context (full source text file)

Yes

No

Yes

Sorting by left/right collocates

Yes

No

Yes

Special characters table

No

Yes

No

Additional functions

Frequency list

Yes

Yes

Yes

Word profile

No

Yes

No

Letter frequency

No

Yes

No

Concordance-based interactive test

No

No

No

Concordancing a text based on a word list (stoplist)

No

No

Yes

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Krajka, J. (2016). Language Teachers Working with Text: Increasing Target Language Awareness of Student Teachers with Do-It-Yourself Corpus Research. In: Chodkiewicz, H., Steinbrich, P., Krzemińska-Adamek, M. (eds) Working with Text and Around Text in Foreign Language Environments. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33272-7_14

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