Nicky Riddiford

Victoria University
PO Box 600
Wellington
04 463 6471
Email

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Adam Kilgarriff
Director Lexical Computing Ltd
Visiting Research Fellow University of Leeds

Using Corpora

With the advent of computers and the web, people working with language can explore it as never before. We can now ask our computers to find lots of examples of a word, phrase, or grammatical construction, and with advanced tools we can also find the core terms for a domain, or the words most often occurring in a construction, or automatically prepare draft dictionary entries. The baseline approach is through Google, but specialist tools and language corpora - prepared to cut out the problems associated with using Google - allow us much more precision. I will introduce two tools - Sketch Engine, for exploring corpora, and WebBootCaT, for building them - and show how they can be used to address a range of tasks and research questions in linguistics and lexicography.

Monday 20 February
12:10-1:00 pm
HULT220
Everyone welcome

Susan Conrad

Department of Applied Linguistics, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, USA

Applying Linguistics to Communication Problems: A Case Study from Engineering

In this presentation I will discuss my experience as an applied linguist working with civil engineers. For decades engineering educators in the U.S. have recognized the need to develop students’ writing skills. Composition, technical writing, and even general engineering communication courses abound, but employers and graduates still complain about a lack of writing skills for engineering practice. As an alternative approach to traditional courses, for the past two years I have worked on a project that empirically investigates the writing and experiences of practicing engineers in the community, as well as the writing and experiences of students and faculty. I use techniques from applied linguistics (especially corpus linguistics) to analyze the problem in more detail, define the troublesome aspects of students’ writing more clearly, and develop teaching materials that can be incorporated into civil engineering courses. Besides presenting some linguistic findings of the work, I will emphasize how this applied linguistics approach differs from the usual approaches taken to this problem. I will also discuss some tricky “cross-cultural” aspects of the project – most notably, the cross-disciplinary challenges of being an applied linguist working with civil engineers, and the contextual contrasts of working with both academicians and practitioners. I will explain why I believe that learning to negotiate these contrasts is important so that applied linguists have the impact they deserve to have on both ESOL and other communication problems.

Friday 24 February
4:00-5:00 pm
MY220
Everyone welcome