Putting the Louvain English for Academic Purposes Dictionary to the test: Implicit vs. explicit feedback
(2017) ELEX2017: Lexicography from scratch — Location: Leiden, The Netherlands (19.September.2017)
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- Authors
Granger, Sylviane 
- Abstract
- The Louvain English for Academic Dictionary (LEAD) is a web-based dictionary-cumwriting aid tool for intermediate to advanced learners of English, which has been running on the Louvain intranet since 2009. The tool can be used autonomously or as a complementary resource in an academic English course (Granger & Paquot 2015). Native and learner corpora of academic writing were used to identify the typical phraseological patterning (collocations and lexical bundles) of cross-disciplinary academic words and to highlight attested problem areas. One of the innovative features of the dictionary is its adaptable user interface, which customises the content based on the users’ discipline (sociology, medicine, etc.) and mother tongue background. Another distinguishing feature is the number of different types of access it offers: by word (semasiological), by function (onomasiological) and via the translation of the word in the user’s mother tongue (bilingual). In the first part of the presentation, we will give a brief overview of how the dictionary has been expanded since it was first evaluated in March 2015. This initial evaluation involved 40 users, who were either students from modern language departments or colleagues from the Faculty of Arts using LEAD autonomously. The questionnaire responses were used to improve the dictionary in two significant ways: (1) enlarge its coverage (from 350 to 1,150 words) and (2) increase the number of disciplines so as to offer more discipline-specific examples of collocations and lexical bundles. The main part of the presentation will be devoted to a new assessment of the tool, due to take place in May 2017. As evaluation is likely to vary in function of the profile of the users and the task they are performing, we focus on a well-defined group of users, i.e. MA students of English who use the LEAD as a complementary resource in their academic English course at Louvain. The students are introduced to the different functionalities of the resource in class and are encouraged to use it when writing papers in English. The assessment procedure relies on explicit and implicit feedback (de Schryver 2013). Explicit feedback takes the form of an online questionnaire that users are invited to complete. Questions focus on users’ search preferences (e.g. how useful is the ‘search by function’ option?) and the use of the LEAD’s main features (e.g. collocations, usage notes, disciplinespecific examples, corpus query tool). Although questionnaire surveys have the advantage of probing users’ perceptions of the tool, they have attracted criticism from a number of researchers. Bergenholtz & Johnsen (2005), for example, observe that “the answers from the informants do not necessarily reflect a real genuine user situation”. It is therefore useful to complement explicit feedback with implicit feedback, extracted from the LEAD’s log files, which provides objective information about the searches performed by the dictionary users. All searches are recorded in MySQL tables, which are used to answer the following research questions: · What percentage of search words has a dedicated entry in the LEAD? · What access route is preferably chosen by students when they write an academic paper? · Do students use the embedded corpus tool? What for? To what extent do results obtained from the log files confirm questionnaire responses? Special attention will be paid to the weaknesses revealed by the questionnaire survey and the log files, and ways of addressing these will be suggested. References Bergenholtz, H. and Johnsen, M. (2005). Log files as a tool for improving Internet dictionaries. Hermes: Journal of Language and Communication Studies 34: 117-141. de Schryver, G-M. (2013). The concept of simultaneous feedback. In R.H. Gouws, U. Heid, W. Schweickard & H.E. Wiegand (eds.). Dictionaries. An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography. Supplementary volume: Recent Developments with Focus on Electronic and Computational Lexicography (pp. 548–556). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Granger, S. & Paquot, M. (2015). Electronic lexicography goes local: Design and structures of a needs-driven online academic writing aid. Lexicographica 31(1), 118-141.
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Granger, S., & Paquot, M. (2017). Putting the Louvain English for Academic Purposes Dictionary to the test: Implicit vs. explicit feedback. ELEX2017: Lexicography from scratch, Leiden, The Netherlands. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/216547