An Evaluation of Intermediate Students' Approaches to Corpus Investigation

This paper reports on our experience in using a corpus of our own compilation, Contemporary Written Italian Corpus (CWIC), in teaching intermediate students at Griffith University in Australia. After an overview of the corpus design and the training approach adopted, we focus on our initial evaluation of the effectiveness of the students' investigations. Much has been written on what can be done with corpora in language learning: what kinds of discoveries can be made with different types of corpora. There is relatively little on how learners actually go about investigations. Since we intend for our students to progress from classroom use to independent work as a result of using a Web-based version of CWIC, we have been seeking to understand how successful they are at extracting information from this corpus in the absence of a teacher. Our initial study highlighted the complexity of the process and the specialized skills required. We found that lack of rigor in observation and reasoning contributed greatly to the problems that arose, as did ignorance of common pitfalls and techniques for avoiding them. We, therefore, conclude the paper with an outline of proposed changes to our apprenticeship program, aimed at better equipping the students as "corpus researchers."