Event

Measuring Productive Lexical Proficiency in Learner Corpora

Saturday, June 12th, 2021, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Speaker: Kristopher Kyle (University of Oregon, U. S. A.)

This seminar will be conducted by 3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days: Saturday, June 12, Sunday, June 13, Saturday, June 19 and Sunday, June 20 from 10:00 to 13:00 (JST). Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. Students can add/drop this seminar course by 14:00 on Saturday, June 12. The pre sign-up (or course registration for those who are taking this seminar for credit) is required for anybody attending the public session on Saturday, June 12 from 10:00 to 13:00. The sign-up process must be completed through "Distinguished Lecturer Series Seminar Sign-Up Form" that is available on TUJ Grad Ed website. The sign-up deadline is Friday, June 11 at 12:00. The public session Zoom link will be provided to those people who completed the online sign-up (or course registration) process between 17:00-18:00 on Friday, June 11.

Lexical proficiency is an essential component of effective written and spoken communication, and is commonly measured as the proportion of sophisticated or advanced words a language learner uses to complete a particular task. Most often, a word's reference corpus frequency determines the degree to which it is considered advanced or sophisticated (e.g., Laufer & Nation, 1995). While frequency is undoubtedly an important feature of sophistication, a number of recent studies have demonstrated that lexical proficiency is most accurately modeled when multiple complementary lexical and lexicogrammatical features are used (e.g., Kim, Crossley, & Kyle, 2018; Kyle, Crossley, & Berger, 2018). This seminar will first provide an introduction to lexical (e.g., frequency and concreteness) and lexicogrammatical (e.g., the association of word combinations) features that affect perceptions of lexical proficiency from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. The broad implications for pedagogical considerations will also be discussed. In the next portions of the seminar, students will be led through a hands-on workshop in which an analysis of lexical sophistication will be conducted using an open-source learner corpus. Finally, students will demonstrate their understand of theoretical and practical concerns surrounding the analysis of lexical sophistication by independently conducting a preliminary study.

Organization: Temple University Japan

Cost: Free

Venue: Online Sign-up by noon on June 11

Location: Online, Online Events, Online Event

Contact Temple University Japan

Temple University Japan

Work phone: 03-5441-9800