Dissertation defense by Leonie Wiemeyer

On Thursday, August 26th, 2021, Leonie Wiemeyer, supervised by Marcus Callies (U Bremen), defended her PhD dissertation “Intertextuality in foreign-language academic writing in English. A mixed-methods study of university students’ writing products and processes in source-based disciplinary assignments” at the University of Bremen. Casey Iezzi (Boise State University / Idaho, USA) and Diane Pecorari (City University Hong Kong) acted as external reviewers of the thesis. Leonie’s work was awarded the highest distinction “summa cum laude”. Congratulations!
Her dissertation utilised a mixed-methods design to investigate intertextuality in L1-German university students academic writing in English, combining a corpus and a process study of a disciplinary writing assignment based on a single source text.

Members of the PhD committee after the successful defense. Picture courtesy of G. Gödecke.

Alexandra Kinne’s PhD dissertation published

We are pleased to announce that Alexandra Kinne has published the PhD dissertation that she defended in May 2018 with Presses Universitaires de Louvain under the title “Particle Placement in English L1 and L2 Academic Writing. A Triangulated Learner-corpus and Experimental Study of Weight Effects”.

Congratulations, Alexandra!

Update (August 2nd, 2021): A review of the book has recently been published in the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.

 

Update (March 2nd, 2023): A second review of the book has recently been published in the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research.

Dissertation defense by Alexandra Kinne

On Friday, May 11th, 2018, Alexandra Kinne, supervised by Marcus Callies (Bremen) and Cristóbal Lozano (Granada), defended her PhD dissertation “Weight as a determinant of syntactic variation in advanced learner varieties. A corpus study of weight effects in L1 and L2 academic writing” at the University of Bremen. Christiane Bongartz (Cologne) acted as third reviewer of the dissertation. Alexandra’s work was awarded the highest distinction “summa cum laude”. Congratulations!
Her dissertation examined how syntactic variation is affected by probabilistic factors in English as an L2, as exemplified by the effect of weight on the highly weight-sensitive word order alternation with two types of multi-word units: English transitive verb-particle constructions (aka particle placement with phrasal verbs such as look up or sort out) and transitive idiomatic verb-prepositional phrase constructions (such as take into account or bear in mind).

CALE-Team at ICAME 39 in Tampere, Finland

Members of the CALE team will be attending the 39th ICAME conference in Tampere in May/June this year.

Nida Dusturia‘s abstract was accepted for a work-in-progress report on “Indonesian EFL learners’ argumentative writing: A learner corpus study of connector usage”. Leonie Wiemeyer and Antorlina Mandal will present a joint paper on “Foreign elements in L2 writers’ research papers – communicative strategy or display of academic literacy?” and Leonie a second paper on “L2 writers’ strategies of paraphrasing, quoting, and textual borrowing in linguistics assignments”.

Marcus Callies co-ogranizes a pre-conference workshop on “Corpus approaches to conceptual metaphor and idioms in World Englishes” with Alexander Onysko (Klagenfurt/Austria) and has two contributions in this workshop: “Corpus approaches to studying conceptual metaphor” (with Alexander) and “Using large electronic corpora to validate elicitation techniques in research on conceptual metaphor and idioms: The case of the “lexicon of corruption” in West African Englishes”.

Workshop “Corpus-based Approaches to Language Learning and Language Assessment”

We will host a workshop “Corpus-based Approaches to Language Learning and Language Assessment” on Monday, February 12, 2018. We are happy to welcome two distinguished LCR researchers from the University of Tübingen for this event: Prof. Dr. Detmar Meurers and Dr. Akira Murakami. They will present their latest research alongside some members of the CALE team.

All welcome!

International summer school “Learner Corpus Research – Theory and practical applications”

We are pleased to announce that we will host an international summer school on Learner Corpus Research from August 27-31, 2018, organised under the aegis of the Learner Corpus Association.The aim of the event is to introduce researchers into the field of Learner Corpus Research through a series of overview lectures and hands-on sessions.

The summer school is targeted at both young researchers, e.g. PhD students who have recently embarked on a learner corpus project, but also more experienced researchers from neighbouring fields such as corpus linguistics, SLA or LTA who want to know more about this dynamic, interdisciplinary field of research.

More information about this event can be found here.

CALE team at LCR 2017 in Bolzano

source: Aivars Glaznieks / Twitter

 

Happy and successful times for two members of the CALE team at this year’s Learner Corpus Research conference in Bolzano/Italy.

Leonie Wiemeyer presented a paper on “Direct quotes, paraphrases, and summaries in L2 academic assignments” and won a book prize as runner-up in the competition for the best paper presented by a PhD student.  Congratulations, Leonie!

Marcus Callies was re-elected vice-president of the Learner Corpus Association for another 4 years of office.