English passive constructions in the interlanguage of German learners
(2011) AILA Junior Research Meeting in Applied Linguistics — Location: Duisburg-Essen/Germany (23.March.2011)
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- Abstract
- In recent years, the educational system in Baden-Württemberg, southwest Germany, has undergone several major changes. 'Immersive-reflective' English lessons have been introduced at the primary level. In secondary schools, more and more CLIL (content and language integrated learning) programmes are being established. But do students' interlanguages change along with the educational setting? Considering the different types of input that learners may be exposed to, the use of the English passive is considered to be indicative of possible structural differences between the interlanguages of the various groups of learners. To study their use of passive structures, written learner language will be collected and compiled in an electronic corpus, whilst controlling learner variables like motivation and general as well as language-related cognitive capacities by means of psychological testing. A tokenizer, lemmatizer, POS-tagger and, possibly, a parser will be used to prepare the written learner data for automatic or semi-automatic analysis, such that the learner texts can be compared to a target norm. The norm that learners can be assumed to aspire to is to be defined by the written input received in the classroom, compiled and annotated in a teaching materials corpus. From the analysis of the two corpora, insights may be gained with respect to the part that different degrees of learning and acquisition play in the development of a learner's interlanguage. The information obtained may serve as an empirical basis to answer questions arising in connection with the teaching of English as a foreign language and in immersive programmes, as well as with curriculum design. The paper will describe the role of the educational setting as the basis of the research hypothesis, the compilation of the target norm corpus as well as the procedures involved in the collection of learner language and metadata and the compilation of the learner corpus.
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Möller, V. (2011). English passive constructions in the interlanguage of German learners. AILA Junior Research Meeting in Applied Linguistics, Duisburg-Essen/Germany. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/62835