Mid Sweden University

This paper reports on an ongoing project at Mid-Sweden University which aims to develop a searchable digital database of completed past papers of the Swedish National Test in English (NTE). Swedish school students are required to take the NTE, similar to Standardised Achievement Tests (SATS), in years 6 and 9. These assess students’ productive and receptive skills in written and spoken English through a range of tasks. Assessment is carried out at individual school level, with national guidance provided, including test specifications, commented answers and authentic samples of benchmarked oral and written performance, cut-off scores etc. (Erikson 2020).

The project began with a small pilot corpus, with the writing component of recent past papers digitized to produce a coded database that included anonymized student responses and teacher assessments. This proved to be an effective resource in English teacher training programmes and for linguistic and didactic research by students (Allan et al. 2023), but the need to develop this into a larger corpus quickly became apparent. The data required for this was made available, in the form of a large quantity of physical NTE papers from a range of schools in the local area. However, these would need to be scanned and processed, which was a large task. The pilot had also highlighted issues to be resolved, such as how to ensure conformity to ethical guidelines, and how to efficiently digitize of large quantities of unstructured material, i.e. handwritten and teacher-corrected text. Here, we discuss how to address these issues, and in particular, consider the potential for freely-available AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini to help process this data.

Women in America played a significant role in the ‘Americanisation Movement’, which aimed to assimilate the large numbers of immigrants arriving to the USA in the early twentieth century into American culture. Learning English was an important part of Americanisation, and women were active in teaching English classes and publishing language teaching manuals. These manuals are the subject of this study. Using five female-authored English teaching manuals published between 1906 and 1915, corpus methods are used to identify the quantity and type of pragmatic language taught, and to survey the topics and themes they contain. These are compared to results from a reference corpus of male-authored manuals from the same period, to examine gender perspectives. The value of using a corpus approach to historical texts of this kind is discussed.

This article describes a collaborative project involving the construction of a corpus of graded year 9 National Tests in written English. National Tests are standardized high stakes tests which are an important part of the Swedish education system because the results provide an indication of performance at national level, and also feed into pupils’ overall assessment. The grading of National Tests in written English has been found to be problematic for teachers, and a need for assessment training identified (Erickson and Tholin 2022). By providing a searchable database of graded written texts, together with the teacher feedback, this project aims to create a resource to support pre- and in-service teachers in interpreting knowledge requirements and assessment guidelines, and providing effective feedback. The corpus will also provide a resource for research into the features of student writing at different grade levels. To create the corpus, past papers from collaborating schools have been anonymized, digitized and coded. As a result, pupils’ texts can be easily sorted by a range of criteria, for example, year, gender, education type, grade achieved on the written paper and overall grade for the National Test. Teacher feedback can be accessed similarly. We outline potential research areas provided by this resource, and demonstrate how some of these might be explored. We also give examples of how the developing corpus has already been used as a resource for English teacher training programmes, and outline future plans for the project.

There has been much discussion about the persistent gap between research and practice in the use of corpora in the classroom (Frankenberg-Garcia 2012; Chambers 2019 among others), despite strong evidence of its benefits (Boulton 2017). The majority of studies into data-driven learning (DDL) have been carried out by those with a particular interest and skill level, predominantly in higher education, and the need to complement these with a broader base of studies involving practising language teachers in a school environment has been highlighted (e.g., Boulton 2010; Chambers 2019). For such studies to take place, however, more school teachers need to be made aware of DDL and its potential for use in the classroom.

This article discusses what we can learn from research into DDL with younger learners and teacher training in this context in order to shape a teacher training programme. It describes a pilot project introducing DDL to a group of secondary school student teachers (STs) of English at a Swedish university, and their responses to it regarding the feasibility of including it in their future teaching practice. The need for further training, particularly in practical pedagogical applications suitable for their learners, was apparent, echoing the outcomes of previous studies. It is suggested that integrating a range of classroom-focused DDL activities throughout their remaining course may be an effective approach. This also provides an opportunity to raise awareness of pre-prepared resources and novel approaches to DDL more likely to appeal to their learners, and practical examples of this are discussed.

This poster presents an ongoing project at Mid-Sweden University which aims to develop asearchable digital database of complete past papers of the Swedish National Test in English.Swedish school students are required to take National Tests in English, similar to StandardisedAchievement Tests (SATS), in years 6 and 9. These assess students’ productive and receptiveskills in written and spoken English through a range of tasks: an oral test carried out in pairs,listening and reading comprehensions with a range of texts and tasks, and a writing test.Assessment is carried out at individual school level, with national guidance provided, includingtest specifications, commented answers and authentic samples of benchmarked oral and writtenperformance, cut-off scores etc. (Erikson 2020).

This presentation considers the contribution made by women to English language teaching and learning in early 20th century America. Following the arrival of large numbers of immigrants to the USA in the early 1900s, there was a requirement for the incoming population to learn English as part of the “Americanization Movement”, to learn the U.S. Constitution, understand the laws and government of their new country and become assimilated into American culture (Cavanaugh 1996). Although policy may have been male-driven, documentation from the period demonstrates that women played a large role in implementing these language policies through both teaching and the publication of language teaching manuals for night schools, shop and settlement classes. 

This study examines five female-authored English teaching manuals published between 1906 and 1915. The teaching approaches taken are typical of this period in the USA, influenced by Sauveur’s Natural Method and Berlitz’s commercially successful Direct Method (Howatt 1984). However, the themes and contextualisation of target language in these books offer insights into this period, and in some cases demonstrate a uniquely female perspective on learners’ needs (e.g. Austin 1913). The texts will be explored using a corpus-based approach, referenced against male-authored manuals from the same period.

In the same way that individual words may be acquired, collocations can be learned incidentally through repeated encounters in context (Webb et al., 2013), or by more explicit methods such as using concordancing tools. Graded readers can be used for both of these approaches, either  through gaining exposure to vocabulary through extensive reading of graded readers (Horst, 2005) or concordancing using a graded corpus (Cobb, 2019). However, it is unclear whether graded readers offer sufficient exposure to frequent collocations to facilitate acquisition. Word frequency and structural complexity are taken into account when simplifying texts, but the effect of such grading on the phraseology of the language used has not been widely explored. 

One corpus study of graded readers at two levels (Allan, 2016) showed that restricting grammatical structures and vocabulary range intensified lexical patterning in simplified texts and thereby led to a higher concentration of common lexical bundles. However, this was found to be optimal with a higher level corpus of graded readers (2,300 headwords), and diminished with more restricted readers (1,700 headwords). 

The present study further explores the effects of text simplification, focusing on verb noun collocations. Three sets of texts are examined, consisting of an unabridged original version and corresponding versions graded to three levels of difficulty. Corpus software is used to identify the frequency and contextual use of the target collocations at the different levels. Tracing their use in this way can shed light on both the number of encounters offered and their transparency to the learner (e.g. through contiguous and non-contiguous use), features which are relevant both to incidental and explicit learning approaches. 

There has been much discussion about the persistent gap between research and practice in the use of corpora in the classroom (Chambers 2019; Frankenberg-Garcia 2012 among others), despite strong evidence of its benefits (Boulton 2017). Chambers (2019) points out that the majority of studies into data-driven learning have been carried out by those with a particular interest and skill level, predominantly in higher education. Developments in corpus training in teacher education courses (e.g. Farr 2008; Naismith 2017; Zareva 2017) may lead to change, but so far there is little evidence that this results in corpus use directly informing teaching practice, or even that it is reasonable to assume that it should (Naismith 2017).  Nevertheless, the need to complement studies on data-driven learning by research-focused practitioners with a broader base of studies by practising language teachers has been highlighted (e.g. Boulton 2010; Chambers 2019). It seems, though, that this will only happen if such teachers find an accessible way to integrate corpus use into classroom practice, and are convinced of its value to students. 

With this in mind, I examine our experience with second level student teachers of English at MidSweden University, and their engagement with corpora. Although these students often carry out corpus-based research in final independent projects, corpus applications tend to be perceived as a research tool and play little to no part in their subsequent teaching practice. To encourage an alternative perspective, at an early stage in their course one new student teacher group was assigned specific teaching-related corpus-based tasks using web-based software, with limited-size corpora provided. They were then asked to consider the feasibility of using similar methods in their teaching practice. I discuss their reactions and evaluate this as a possible step towards normalising corpus use among teachers.    

Boulton, A. 2010. “Learning outcomes from corpus consultation.” In M. M. Jaén, F. S. Valverde, & M. C. Pérez (Eds.), Exploring new paths in language pedagogy: Lexis and corpus-based language teaching, 129–144. London: Equinox.

Boulton, A. 2017. “Corpora in language teaching and learning.” Language Teaching 50: 483–506. DOI:10.1017/S0261444817000167

Chambers, A. 2019. “Towards the corpus revolution? Bridging the research-practice gap.” Language Teaching 52: 460–475. DOI:10.1017/S0261444819000089

Farr, F. 2008. “Evaluating the use of corpus-based instruction in a language teacher education context: Perspectives from the users.” Language Awareness 17:25–43. DOI: 10.2167/la414.0

Frankenberg-Garcia, A. 2012. “Raising teachers’ awareness of corpora.” Language Teaching 45: 475–489. DOI:10.1017/S0261444810000480

Naismith, B. 2017. “Integrating corpus tools on intensive CELTA courses.” ELT Journal 71: 273-283. DOI:10.1093/elt/ccw076

Zareva, A. 2017. “Incorporating corpus literacy skills into TESOL teacher training.” ELT Journal 71: 69-79. DOI:10.1093/elt/ccw045