26. January 2017: Guest lecture by Seval Özen (Freiburg)

On Thursday, January 26th 2017, our project partner Seval Özen, PhD candidate at Freiburg university, gave a guest lecture on the topic “Multi-Word Verb Usage by Turkish Learners of English: A Corpus-based Study”.

After the first attention-shift from grammar to lexis seen in 1960s, the attention of the last 15 years or so has turned towards lexical groups, i.e. to multi-word units such as collocations, phrasal verbs, chunks, etc. From the 1980s onwards, the increasing availability of large electronic corpora has made it possible to explore vast amounts of authentic language data both qualitatively and quantitatively without difficulty and uncover the highly patterned nature of language use. Whereas formerly multi-word units were treated as peripheral exceptions and linguistic rarities, a substantial body of research now exists to show that natural language use, both written and spoken, largely consists of recurrent word sequences. Therefore, they have increasingly been regarded as important building blocks for language acquisition and use. In the context of foreign or second language learning, multi-word units constitute a particularly interesting phenomenon since they are known to cause problems for learners. One group of multi-word units that causes great difficulty even for advanced learners of English is multi-word verbs. Their acquisition and active usage is a challenge since they are complex both in terms of their grammatical form and their lexical meaning. In this talk, an on-going dissertation project on the use of multi-word verbs by Turkish learners of English will be presented.  The focus will be on one sub-group of multi-word verbs investigated in the Turkish sub-corpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) – namely phrasal verbs.

Research scholarships for doctoral researchers

Congratulations to three team members who were awared doctoral research scholarships by the University of Bremen in the context of the BremenIDEA out funding initiative. Doctoral researchers of the University of Bremen can receive funding for stays up to 3 months at international research institutions.

 

 

Happy Holidays from the CALE team!

cale-christmas

Now that Christmas is drawing near, we would like to take the opportunity to send you our best wishes for the festive season.

It has been an exciting year for the CALE team. The team members presented studies using data from the Corpus of Academic Learner English at a number of international conferences. Marcus Callies, Ekaterina Zaytseva, and Leonie Wiemeyer presented at the 36th ICAME conference in Trier, Germany; Alexandra Kinne, Tonia Sperling, and Ekaterina Zaytseva gave talks at the International Pragmatics Conference (IPra) 2015 in Antwerp, Belgium; and Marcus Callies, Alexandra Kinne, Leonie Wiemeyer, and Ekaterina Zaytseva presented their papers at the Learner Corpus Research conference in Cuijk, the Netherlands, amongst others.

Marcus Callies edited a volume on “Learner corpora in language testing and assessment: Prospects and challenges” together with Sandra Götz from the University of Gießen, Germany, and the newly launched International Journal of Learner Corpus Research edited by Marcus Callies and Magali Paquot has seen the successful publication of its first two issues boasting high-quality contributions to the field. (For a detailed overview of the CALE team’s presentations and publications, see Presentations and Publications).

Work on two new PhD projects in the field of learner corpus research – Nida Dusturia’s and Leonie Wiemeyer’s, both of which are being supervised by Marcus Callies – has also begun in 2015.

We hope that 2015 has been equally exciting for you and wish you all happy holidays, a relaxing (or productive, whichever you prefer) winter vacation and a great start to a healthy and successful new year 2016!

Best wishes from the CALE team!

CALE launches new blog

Aside

As of December 2015, information about the Corpus of Academic Learner English (CALE) can be accessed through this blog. The CALE is an English-for-Academic-purposes learner corpus currently being compiled in the context of the research project “Lexico-grammatical variation in advanced learner varieties”.