Cesare Zanca

Corpora in the translation classroom? No, please, we are students! Using online resources and corpora in the classroom. Corpora, as we all know, can be extremely useful in the classroom. Teachers can use concordances, keyness and frequencies to create exciting activities. Students can develop awareness and self confidence, autonomy and accuracy in L2. I entirely agree. But most of my students do not. Introducing corpora in the classroom is not an easy task: most of the experiences described by research articles, books and online publications illustrate either advanced and highly motivated students who collect and sometimes annotate their own corpus, or presentations to the classroom of the results of research previously conducted by the teacher. Teachers do not have many chances to include the basics of corpus linguistics in the syllabus of the average L2 classroom And if they do the students’ reaction may not be enthusiastic. The result is that most students are unlikely to acquire...

Cesare Zanca – Università degli Studi di Siena abstract Il progetto AICLUCert è probabilmente, in varia misura, noto a molti dei partecipanti al Seminario AICLU di Siena. Tuttavia forse non tutti sanno che il progetto prevede, oltre alla definizione ed alla realizzazione di una certificazione per le lingue straniere che possa essere condivisa ed utilizzata dai Centri Linguistici Italiani, anche la possibilità di collaborare condividere e realizzare test, prove di piazzamento e di esame che mirano ad esigenze più specifiche. Il sistema informatico AICLUCert per la creazione e la condivisione dei test è stato studiato per consentire ai CLA, anche in numero limitato, di collaborare a progetti condivisi. Sarà così possibile, ad esempio, che tre CLA decidano di condividere i propri test di piazzamento, incrementando il numero di items disponibili semplicemente integrandoli con quelli sviluppati da altri CLA. Sarà possibile definire protocolli di sviluppo di nuovi test mirati, ad esempio,...

 'Going for gold' on the web and in corpora: can language learners (and teachers) do it?  The great proliferation of excellent online learning materials and tools is both an opportunity and a challenge for the language teacher. As more and more courses include online modules, the ability to find, evaluate and appropriately use online tools is becoming an essential teaching skill. On the other side, learners tend not to use online FL resources on their own, mainly because of lack of confidence and their limited competence in the foreign language.   When dealing with unfiltered web pages in a foreign language, both teachers and  learners, with different perspectives, need to overcome inevitable hurdles: can we help (and ourselves) them going for gold?  This paper deals with a restricted area of this issue and develops on the ideas about introducing corpus driven activities in the classroom through freely available and user friendly online resources discussed in Zanca (2011). I...

Equality policies in the English press: A study of diversity in a diachronic corpus of newspapers Recent political events, such as the USA Presidential elections, the Brexit referendum in UK and the rise in the popularity of sovereignist, populist and nationalist and nativist movements in Europe have deeply shaken Western democracies and many achievements in terms of equality and solidarity policies, that were assumed to be deep-seated and irreversible, are challenged. New persuasive messages are emerging: political slogans, such as Britain First (and Britain could be easily replaced by Italy, France, Germany and other nations); petitions regarding the urgent need to defend national borders and build new walls; calls for the protection of European cultural and religious heritage from ‘external’ attacks are just a few examples of emerging propositions that might jeopardize the policies of diversity, inclusion and integration introduced in the last few decades in Europe, the USA and in most advanced democracies. Concerns about this trend and the need to defend diversitypolicies have been expressed by several studies (e.g. Kymlicka 2016; Conversi 2014) and are the starting point of the present discussion, based on a research of the diachronic use of the lexical item diversityin journalistic discourse. The basic assumption is that among the persuasive strategies adopted by political and journalistic discourse is the repeated association of selected key items -such as Muslims, immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees(Baker et al. 2013) or Roma(Erjavec 2001) -with other words or contextual frames suggesting either a positive or a negative evaluation. The reiteration of such associations constructs an ‘us and them’ pattern and contributes to the emergence of new attitudes and opinions in the audience. In previous studies of UK newspapers, based both on the SiBol-Port Corpus5and some ad hoc corpora collected by the author (Zanca 2015, 2017, 2018) the lexical item diversity appeared as virtually invariably associated with discourses indicating inclusive, empathic and positive contexts. According to the tradition of researchers such as Van Dijk (1991) this meant that discourses about diversity were largely reproduced by the press as part of a shared set of values in the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. There were, nonetheless, somerelevant, exceptions, particularly when the discourse was related to ethnic or racial issues. This paper extends the research to a new 2018 corpus of newspapers articles including the item diversity. The corpus consists of British, and American newspapers, but also newspapers published in English in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, China and India. The 2018 data will be compared to data collected in previous years and, following the MdCADS methodology suggested in Partington (2010, 2013), the different corpora will be used to conduct quantitative and qualitative investigations aimed at ‘unveiling’ discourse features related to the idea of diversity and “the broader societal and political framework in which such discourse is embedded” (Schäffner 1996: 201), shunting back and forward from numbers and statistical information to qualitative findings and evaluations to identify “the relationship between instance and system, between the typical and the exceptional, between signal and noise” (Partington 2004). A preliminary analysis of the results seems to indicate an overall persisting large prevalence of the traditional positive discourse framework associated with the word diversity, but also that some significant changes are present: for instance in terms of criticism to diversity policies by some newspapers and in terms of the frequency by which the word appears in different areas of the diversity discourse (e.g. gender, social, ethnic or economic diversity)

The inspiration for this paper stems from my experience as a teacher of translation courses and as a researcher in two distinct fields: technology enhanced language learning and Data Driven Learning. Johns and King (1991) define Data Driven Learning as “the use in the classroom of computergenerated concordances to get students to explore regularities of patterning in the target language, and the development of activities and exercises based on concordance output”, thus embedding this approach in the wider area of Corpus Linguistics, a discipline which has proved extremely beneficial to linguistics and translation studies. The aim of the paper is an attempt to bridge the two approaches in a new and creative interpretation of autonomous and student centred learning which would be extremely useful and I’d dare say almost necessary to our translation studies students. The presentation will be based on several examples of online activities and resources based on a Moodle website and used...

Corpora, as we all know, can be extremely useful to translators and in the classroom. Translators can explore them to find lexical items, collocative patterns, phraseology etc. Teachers can use wordlists, concordances, keyness and frequencies to create exciting activities. Students can develop awareness and self confidence, autonomy and accuracy in L2 and translate more effectively, but introducing corpora in the classroom is not an easy task: most of the experiences described by research articles, books and online publications illustrate either advanced and highly motivated students who are able to collect and sometimes annotate their own corpus, or a presentation to the classroom of the results of a piece of research previously conducted by the teacher. The aim of the paper is to suggest an approach leading to inductive discovery of language patterns and usage through activities based on selected online resources which are more familiar to students but can nonetheless gradually de...

Denise Haywood, Jeff Haywood (University of Edinburgh) Angela Joyce, Sue Timmis, Jasper Tredgold, (University of Bristol) Isabel Pérez (University of Granada) Louwarnoud van der Duim (University of Groningen) Nicki Mrose, Kamakshi Rajagopal, Steven Verjans (Catholic University of Leuven) Anthony Baldry, Ivana Marenzi (University of Pavia) Cesare Zanca (University of Siena) Aune Valk (University of Tartu) Matti Lappalainen (University of Turku) Axelle Devaux, Inge Knudsen, Nathalie Sonveaux (Coimbra Group)

Corpus linguistics approaches are more and more often exploited in the study of specialised languages (Bowker and Pearson 2002) and corpora have proven to be invaluable tools in the identification and analysis of specific genres, domains and discourses. Keywords, collocates and clusters have become key concepts in both language research and teaching, particularly so in the teaching of LSP (Gavioli 2005). The present study aims at contributing to the debate on the criteria used in corpus planning, gathering and assembling by focusing on the comparison between a set of existing large specialised corpora, assembled for various research projects: the CorDis corpus (conceived as representative of the 2003 conflict in Iraq, Morley and Bayley 2009), the IntUne corpus (Williams and Bayley forhcoming) and the WHoB corpus (Venuti et al 2009). Previous studies have focused on the different meanings and connotations that the lexical item ‘war’ acquired in the various sub-corpora of the CorDis corpus, i.e. newspapers, television news, Parliamentary debates, and White House Press Briefings (Zanca 2011, Riccio Venuti ). We now want to verify to what extent the collocational profile of this and other lexical items can be influenced and possibly restrained by the selection criteria of the whole corpus by comparing the use of the same terms in the IntUne and WHoB corpora, which contain the same genres and domains (newspapers and TV news programmes the former, White House Press Briefings the latter) and are representative of the genres in specific time spans rather than according to a specific topic. The findings should contribute to a more coherent and considered determination of the criteria underlying the collection of large corpora and the interpretation of results both in linguistic research and language or LSP teaching.

Abstract Corpora, as we all know, can be extremely useful to translators and in the classroom. Translators can explore them to find lexical items, collocative patterns, phraseology etc. Teachers can use wordlists, concordances, keyness and frequencies to ...

Abstract Corpora, as we all know, can be extremely useful to translators and in the classroom. Translators can explore them to find lexical items, collocative patterns, phraseology etc. Teachers can use wordlists, concordances, keyness and frequencies to ...

Abstract Corpora, as we all know, can be extremely useful to translators and in the classroom. Translators can explore them to find lexical items, collocative patterns, phraseology etc. Teachers can use wordlists, concordances, keyness and frequencies to ...

Abstract Corpora, as we all know, can be extremely useful to translators and in the classroom. Translators can explore them to find lexical items, collocative patterns, phraseology etc. Teachers can use wordlists, concordances, keyness and frequencies to ...

Abstract For the acquisition of a second language the World Wide Web offers an abundance of learning resources that can provide opportunities for meaningful, realistic, contextualized language activities. This paper presents the WebLingu@ project of blended English ...