Issues in Compiling and Exploiting Textbook Corpora – Elen Le Foll for JAECS Conference, Oct 2020
Channel: Elen Le Foll
Date: 2020-10-04

Issues in Compiling and Exploiting Textbook Corpora, Elen Le Foll, Osnabrück University (elefoll@uos.de) 
Online conference of the Japanese Association for English Corpus Studies (JAECS2020), October 2020 

Slides available for download here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344285423_Issues_in_Compiling_and_Exploiting_Textbook_Corpora

Textbooks are known to be “one of the most important educational inputs” (Pingel 2010: 7) and, as such, have long been cherished objects of research, especially in the social and political sciences. In applied linguistics, page-by-page analysis of textbook language was once a difficult, time-consuming process. However, the development of digital data storage and retrieval enabled Mindt (1987; 1992) to pioneer a new approach to language textbook analysis using computer-readable textbook corpora. Since, multiple studies have highlighted the potential of corpus-based textbook analysis both for materials development and evaluation, and as a means of capturing learner language input and better understanding learner language production (cf. Römer 2004; Meunier & Gouverneur 2009).

However, in practice, compiling textbook corpora can be an arduous task, fraud with potential pitfalls. In this paper, I highlight some of the issues specific to compiling a corpus of textbooks and propose possible solutions. The compiling process begins with the selection of the materials to be included in the corpus, a process driven by the research questions. I discuss questions pertaining to the design of the sampling frame, corpus size, representativeness, and balance (cf. Biber 1993). Due to the many different font types, colours, and often complex page layouts, automatic OCR (optical character recognition) is usually much more complex for textbooks.

For many corpus linguistic measures, the basic unit is the text. However, textbooks are essentially collections of many different texts. Moreover, textbooks also pose problems due to some texts being extremely short (e.g. instructions), whilst others can span several pages (short story). In addition, what constitutes a textbook must also be defined since educational publishers now offer multimedia packages that include coursebooks, workbooks, teacher’s guides, audio and video materials, etc.

These issues in compiling and exploiting textbook corpora are illustrated with examples from the compilation and analysis of a manually annotated textbook corpus of nine series (43 volumes) of secondary school EFL textbooks.

https://www.elenlefoll.eu