Exploiting parsed corpora in grammar teaching (2019)

Abstract: The principal barrier to the uptake of technologies in schools is not technological, but social and political. Teachers must be convinced of the pedagogical benefits of a particular curriculum before they will agree to learn the means to teach it. The teaching of formal grammar to first language students in schools is no exception to this rule. Over the last three decades, most schools in England have been legally required to teach grammatical subject knowledge, i.e. linguistic knowledge of grammar terms and structure, to children age five and upwards as part of the national curriculum in English. A mandatory set of curriculum specifications for England and Wales was published in 2014, and elsewhere similar requirements were imposed. However, few current English school teachers were taught grammar themselves, and the dominant view has long been in favour of ‘real books’ rather than the teaching of a formal grammar. English grammar teaching thus faces multiple challenges: to convince teachers of the value of grammar in their own teaching, to teach the teachers the knowledge they need, and to develop relevant resources to use in the classroom. Alongside subject knowledge, teachers need pedagogical knowledge – how to teach grammar effectively and how to integrate this teaching into other kinds of language learning. The paper introduces the Englicious1 web platform for schools, and summarises its development and impact since publication. Englicious draws data from the fully-parsed British Component of the International Corpus of English, ICE-GB. The corpus offers plentiful examples of genuine natural language, speech and writing, with context and potentially audio playback. However, corpus examples may be ageinappropriate or over-complex, and without grammar training, teachers are insufficiently equipped to use them. In the absence of grammatical knowledge among teachers, it is insufficient simply to give teachers and children access to a corpus. Whereas so-called ‘classroom concordancing’ approaches offer access to tools and encourage bottom-up learning, Englicious approaches the question of grammar teaching in a concept-driven, top-down way. It contains a modular series of professional development resources, lessons and exercises focused on each concept in turn, in which corpus examples are used extensively. Teachers must be able to discuss with a class why, for instance, work is a noun in a particular sentence, rather than merely report that it is. The paper describes the development of Englicious from secondary to primary, and outlines some of the practical challenges facing the design of this type of teaching resource. A key question, the ‘selection problem’, concerns how tools parameterise the selection of relevant examples for teaching purposes. Finally we discuss curricula for teaching teachers and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the intervention.

## introduction parsed corpora, or 'treebanks', have a wide range of applications, from research into language production and variation, to providing the knowledge base for natural language processing algorithms. in language education, parsed corpora have untapped potential in the development of teaching resources and curricula, at a wide range of levels. this application is the focus of this paper. for three decades in the uk, the school curriculum has been directed top-down by government. since the 1990s, l1 (first language) english teaching has had an increasing emphasis on concepts of grammar, especially in the most recent version of the curriculum, which has been taught in schools since 2014 (department for education 2013). this shift in emphasis has faced opposition from mainstream teacher opinion, which tends to see grammar teaching as prescriptive, of limited benefit, and contrary to a child's linguistic creativity. yet both primary (junior) and secondary (high) schools have faced increasing demands placed upon them to teach english grammar. @xcite this paper examines how parsed corpora can be used in classroom teaching to address the needs of the new curriculum while offering teachers a descriptive approach to grammar that can be empowering for students. corpora have been used in education for a number of years. we first discuss the perspective of 'data-driven learning' (ddl, sometimes referred to as 'classroom concordancing', johns and king 1991), which hands students the same research tools as academic researchers, sets them tasks and encourages them to explore the data. this approach has proved effective in intermediate-to-advanced translation studies for idiomatic expressions. in this application, the translator student has an understanding of the context of the utterance in both languages and can interpret the data they are presented with. what vygotsky famously referred to as the 'zone of proximal development' (chaiklin 2003) is the novel target phrase for translation, 'scaffolded' by the already-understood surrounding context. but is ddl effective for teaching first-language grammar in schools, as johns and king advocate? various linguists, including kaltenböck and mehlmauer-larcher (2005) have questioned the effectiveness of ddl in this context. without a knowledgeable teacher to direct the class, students learn only that language use is varied, without grasping the reasons for that variation. they can over-generalise from a few examples. peering into a corpus, we can see that something is the case but we cannot see why it is. below we consider how natural language samples, whether drawn from a corpus or not, can be used effectively for l1 english grammar teaching. ## teaching english grammar in schools in 2009, the survey of english usage began a project aimed at developing grammar teaching resources for uk secondary (high) school english teachers. the starting point of this project, called teaching english grammar in schools (aarts and smith-dennis 2018), was the observation that simply giving teachers and students access to a corpus (a 'ddl' approach) is insufficient, even with a corpus and tool as sophisticated as ice-gb and icecup. as we have seen, most teachers' existing knowledge is limited, whether this be knowledge of the subject or of pedagogical strategies for teaching it. icecup contains a complete help file with a glossary of grammatical terms, and the help system can even trigger searches for examples in icecup. but the learning curve for teachers with no training in grammar is simply too steep, and their time too limited, for this strategy to be sufficient. ## conclusions englicious is both a proof-of-concept and a strategic pedagogical project. it could not be successful if 'knowledge transfer' was conceived of as being one-way, from academics to teachers. by contrast, resources have been developed by working with teachers, in developing resources at both secondary and primary school level and in evaluating them in practice, developing guidance and teacher-training materials alongside lesson plans. it is a highly 'political' project in two senses. first, a generation of schoolteachers need to be persuaded that grammar is relevant to the english curriculum -a reflection of the history of english grammar teaching in schools and the highly politicised rejection of prescriptive grammar in the past. second, it cannot help but be political in the wider macro-politics of education policy. unfortunately the wider issue of primary school children being made to sit a test on which their future (and the future of their school) risks overwhelming a proper pedagogical debate about the best way to empower children to express themselves by understanding the rules of sentence formation. the most convincing justification for teaching grammar in schools must ultimately be that grammar knowledge is useful for children to acquire. the next stage of the teaching english grammar in schools project must concern evaluation. the following question is crucial: does teaching explicit grammar knowledge improve children's literacy skills? in other words, is the teaching of grammar worthwhile terms of literacy outcomes? as myhill (2005) observed, with regard to writing, an answer to this apparently simple question has been elusive in the past. in part this was because the teaching of grammar was dominated by prescriptivism. if simply teaching meta-language alone has not improved pupil literacy, either the meta-language is irrelevant (as some teachers argue) or more effort must be made to show teachers and children how to apply it. there is growing evidence for the hypothesis that teaching clause structure in context can improve secondary students' writing (andrews 2009). in one of the largest randomised control trials yet undertaken, myhill et al. (2012) found that the contextualised teaching of grammar as a 'design tool' offering 'a repertoire of possibilities' to the writer had a significant and positive effect on their writing development. this study concerned an intervention that most benefited the more able secondary school students, and questions remain regarding strategies directed at less able children. perhaps unsurprisingly, this study also highlighted the importance of the linguistic subject knowledge of the school teacher in directing the class. by contrast, despite the statutory emphasis on primary school education, the evidence that explicit grammar teaching improves primary literacy remains mixed and under-researched. one question we are concerned with is whether some of the innovations in primary play-oriented learning that englicious contains (such as the 'slot machine') can improve children's ability to apply grammar rules in their own work, as well as perhaps motivate the learning of grammatical meta-language. what is the most appropriate role of real language and corpora? as we developed englicious, ice-gb has been the principal source of examples for both exemplification and evaluation, but the readability level and relevance of many sentences in the adult british english corpus has meant that without filtering they are only suitable for later years in secondary school. valuable resources at this school level (key stage 4 and 'a' level include whole texts of speech and writing, and project work exploring spoken language and register variation. on the other hand as we have seen the development team had to manually select or edit examples for younger children, or simply create their own. the fact that the corpus is parsed means that it is a source of a vast number of potential example constructions, but the limited definitions of the national curriculum mean that not all constructions we are likely to find are explained. were the non-statutory glossary to be developed further at secondary level, some of these issues would likely be resolved.