Parallel Corpora and Chinese Lexical Learning

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Parallel Corpora and Chinese Lexical Learning

Chen-hui Tsai, HoJung Choi (The University of Iowa)

Abstract: Recently corpora have become valuable sources of authentic materials for advanced language learners. Although some research has shown that English-Chinese parallel corpora help learners to be more aware of the different uses of words in different contexts, little attention has been devoted to how instructors can apply corpora to teach vocabulary, and for what kinds of vocabulary a corpus is preferable to dictionaries and textbooks. The subjects involved in this study were 14 college students registered in intermediate Chinese classes in a Mid-western university. Target lexical items were categorized into three categories. Data indicate that parallel corpora had beneficial effects on subjects’ learning of those lexical items in categories 2 and 3, in which Chinese lexical items have several English equivalences or have no equivalence.

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Internet Chinese Education, 2005.

The whole proceedings are available at the following link:

http://edu.ocac.gov.tw/icice2005/

 

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回复：Parallel Corpora and Chinese Lexical Learning

The fulltext is available at http://www.elet.org.tw/icice2005/html/paper2/C13.pdf

 

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回复：Parallel Corpora and Chinese Lexical Learning

Sounds interesting but some questions remain. From the decription, it
seems that the control group was basically deprived of the chance to
access any authentic material in performing the three tasks, wheras the
experimental group has access to the parallel corpora. A better design, it
seems to me, would involve the control group having access
to random E/C materials as opposed to a parallel corpus.

原文：
Weekly Task. The weekly task was scheduled for the day following
the vocabulary class. Each task, involving 9 target vocabulary items
in three categories, was made up of three parts: 1) negotiating
meanings of lexical items (7 minutes), 2) translating short sentences
which included lexical items from the first part (13 minutes), and
3) making a short composition in Chinese using those target lexical
items (30 minutes). Both groups were asked to complete the same
weekly task. Ten-minute pretests were given to all subjects to reveal
their knowledge of the 9 lexical items prior to completing the task.
The only difference was that the experimental group was required to
use parallel corpora to complete their weekly task with the screen
recorder software, Camtasia, recording the movements the subjects
made during the task. After the completion of the task, all subjects
took another ten-minute posttest to see the immediate influence of
the different learning aids on learning target vocabulary items. For
the format of pre- and posttest, please see Appendix B. Both
pre- and posttests were paper-pencil tests.