Seventh Heritage Language Research Institute

Heritage Speakers and the Advantages of Bilingualism

professional development \ institutes \ 2013 institute

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Corpus linguistics and heritage language corpora

by Olesya V. Kisselev

Corpus linguistics has achieved a well-earned recognition in linguistic research in the past few decades as investigations of large principled digitized collections of authentic texts, or language corpora, have begun to change our views on language and language use. Investigations of corpora have become ubiquitous in all fields of contemporary theoretical and applied linguistics, language pedagogy and even other disciplines in social studies and humanities.

Aim of the Workshop

The aim of this workshop is to bring together language researchers and language teachers, who are interested in developing and/or using heritage language corpora for a variety of purposes: linguistic research, language acquisition or pedagogy research, and /or classroom applications. The participants will explore available tools and platforms for development and analysis of their own heritage language corpora.

Structure of the Workshop

The workshop will provide an overview of the current state of corpus linguistics, and second language and heritage language corpora in particular.  The participants will be then introduced to basic corpus development techniques and a number of freely-available platforms, which will enable them to create small pilot corpora using existing materials or, preferably, materials that they will have brought. The participants will review and then sample corpus analysis techniques. The workshop will close with a discussion of multiple applications of corpus approach to the study of heritage languages.

No special skills are required to become an expert corpus user and developer!