Designing and using a bilingual writer corpus, Prof David Palfreyman
Channel: Language on the Move
Date: 2021-03-15

Professor David Palfreyman, Zayed University, Dubai, speaks about "Designing and using a bilingual writer corpus"

The recording was made as part of the Departmental Seminar series of the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University and the Language-on-the-Move Lectures in Linguistic Diversity.

Abstract: The language corpus (a large, structured collection of authentic language texts) has become a valuable resource for research on language. Corpora offer large, representative samples of ‘real world’ language use, which can be searched for examples of words or constructions; they are often enriched with annotations so that they can be searched for more underlying meanings or structures, errors or other features. However, language corpora have until very recently not been prepared with a focus on biliteracy. Instead, they have tended to focus on a single language; even research on learner corpora of writing in English (or in another language) tends to compare this writing with a reference corpus of writing by other, ‘native’ users of the same language.

This lecture discusses the potential of a new type of corpus: the bilingual writer corpus, which focuses instead on a large set of bilingual writers writing in both their languages. Unlike a ‘parallel corpus’ (which pairs texts in one language with translations of those same texts into another language), the bilingual writer corpus matches comparable texts in different languages written by the same writer on different occasions.

One of the first examples of a bilingual writer corpus is the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC), developed by David Palfreyman, Zayed University, and Nizar Habash, New York University Abu Dhabi. This presentation explains some of the principles of design and methodology for the corpus, and some of the possibilities for research using ZAEBUC and bi/multilingual corpora more generally.

Presenter bio: Dr. David M. Palfreyman is a Professor in the Language Studies Department at Zayed University, United Arab Emirates.  His background is in language teaching, teacher education and socio-cultural contexts of language use and learning. He is the author of several well-cited publications relating to learner autonomy, and lead editor of the books "Learner Autonomy Across Cultures" (Palgrave); "Learning and Teaching Across Cultures in Higher Education" (Palgrave); and "Academic Biliteracies" (Multilingual Matters). He is also founding editor of the journal "Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Gulf Perspectives"

A tweet summary of the lecture can be found at https://twitter.com/Lg_on_the_Move/status/1367689267447701511