Construction-driven learning: Using corpora to foster L2 construction learning
(2018) International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG10) — Location: Paris (16.July.2018)
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- Abstract
- Construction Grammar, following a usage-based perspective, claims that constructions emerge in the constructicon through abstraction over a large number of instances of the construction (e.g. Tomasello 2003, Goldberg 2006). Thus, children are said to generalize associations of form and function from the input they receive and to gradually build their knowledge of the language on that basis. If we consider second language (L2) acquisition (with a focus on foreign learners) rather than first language (L1) acquisition, however, the process of construction learning is expected to be slightly different. On the one hand, foreign language learners usually receive much less exposure to the target language than children acquiring their mother tongue, because they live in an environment that does not use the target language as a language of daily interactions. Their input in the target language is therefore mainly limited to the classroom. On the other hand, construction learning tends to be explicit and deductive in the case of foreign learners, as opposed to the implicit and inductive learning that characterizes first language acquisition. In the foreign language classroom, for example, a construction like the passive voice is typically taught through a set of rules, rather than (or at least in addition to) exposure to instances of the construction. In this presentation, I will show how L2 construction learning can benefit from the corpus-based pedagogical method of data-driven learning (DDL), which consists in giving learners access to corpus material so that they can make their own discoveries about the target language (see Johns 2002). Taking a construction as a starting point, one can design DDL exercises and activities that foster the learning of this particular construction. Such a “construction-driven learning” approach has at least two advantages. First, it makes it possible for learners to get exposed to many instances of one and the same construction, thus accelerating a process that would take much longer if the learners were to receive a normal kind of classroom input. Second, the input that the learners receive is authentic, representing naturally-occurring language from corpora and displaying features whose distribution is supposed to be representative of the target language. I will report on an experiment conducted among French-speaking university students learning English as a foreign language. Through a construction-driven learning approach, the students are exposed to English constructions that do not have any equivalents in French (to avoid the possibility that the learners already have the schema of the construction stored in their L1 constructicon), such as the into-causative construction (e.g. to blackmail him into marrying her (BNC)) and the way construction (e.g. to waffle his way into a gentler position (BNC)). Illustrations will be provided of exercises done by the students, as well as instances of constructions they produced after the activities. The efficiency of this pedagogical method for L2 construction learning will be investigated, as well as learners’ attitudes towards construction-driven learning, and the capacity of DDL to make L2 acquisition more similar to L1 acquisition (i.e. more implicit and inductive) will be discussed.
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Gilquin, G. (2018). Construction-driven learning: Using corpora to foster L2 construction learning. International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG10), Paris. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/126259