Table of Contents Piotr Pęzik Introduction 7 Bas Aarts, Dan Clayton and Sean Wallis Creating Corpus-Driven Teaching and Learning Resources for Secondary School Grammar Teaching 11 Barbora Štindlová, Alexandr Rosen, Jirka Hana and Svatava Škodová CzeSL – an Error Tagged Corpus of Czech as a Second Language 21 Piotr Pęzik Towards the PELCRA Learner English Corpus 33 Jersus Colmenares A New Look at Materials Evaluation: Using Corpus to Count Collocations in EFL Textbooks Used in Venezuela 43 Jacek Waliński Enhancing Intercultural Communicative Competence in an Online Collaborative Assessment Environment: CEFcult project 55 Anna Cichosz A Parallel Latin – Old English Corpus of Biblical Translations as a Tool for Word Order Studies 65 Joanna Kopaczyk Applications of the Lexical Bundles Method in Historical Corpus Research 83 Silvia de Candia, Mikołaj Deckert and Marco Venuti Talking about Europe in British, Italian and Polish TV News Programmes 97 Katarzyna Fronczak-Bartnikowska Keywords and the Discourse of Presidential Election Campaign in the USA, 2007-2008 – a Case Study in McCain’s and Obama’s Speeches 113 Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Frauke Zeller The Media in Transforming Audiences and Societies 127 Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski Investigating Semantic Sequences in Academic Legal Discourse. An Exploratory Study 149 Marcin Grygiel Establishing Affirmation Modality as a Valid Grammatical Category in Serbian Through Internet-Based Research 159 Renata Novotná The Czech Preposition na and Its Polish Equivalents 173 Milena Hebal-Jezierska The Image of the Lexeme Based on an Analysis of Collocations 183 Karlheinz Moerth and Matej Durco In Quest of a Multi-Purpose Multi-Corpus Service-Based Corpus Research Tool 193 Anelia Belogay, Diman Karagiozov, Damir Ćavar, Dan Cristea, Svetla Koeva, Roumen Nikolov, Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Adam Przepiórkowski, Polivios Raxis and Cristina Vertan i-Publisher, i-Librarian and EUDocLib – Linguistic Services for the Web 203 Marcin Miłkowski Translation Quality Checking in LanguageTool 213 Belinda Maia and Rui Sousa-Silva How DOES Google Translate? 225 Łukasz Grabowski A Corpus-Driven Comparison of Translational and Non-Translational Literary Polish 233 Natalia Quinteiro and Gabriel Quiroz Analysis of the Translation of the Phraseological Units of Cien Años de Soledad into English: a Corpus-based Study 245 Monika Czarnecka CAT Tools in the Work of Polish Translators of Specialised Texts 255 Anna Bączkowska Language and Power in Multimodal Audiovisual Translation 267 Introduction Piotr Pęzik Over the recent years corpus tools and methodologies have gained widespread recognition in various areas of theoretical and applied linguistics. Data lodged in corpora is used across languages and disciplines as distinct as historical linguistics, language didactics, discourse analysis, machine translation and search engine development to name but a few. The biennial PALC conference has been organized for the last 14 years at the University of Łódź to help a wide community of researchers, language professionals and practitioners keep up to date with new corpus theories and methodologies as well as language-related applications of computational tools and resources. Over the years the list of PALC conference participants has included hundreds of linguists, lexicographers, translators, foreign and native language teachers, methodologists, journalists and media discourse analysts, computer scientists working in the field of language processing, and many other scholars and practitioners of different disciplines and backgrounds. More than 30 papers were presented at the 8th Practical Applications in Language and Computers conference organized held in Łódź in 2011 with plenary lectures delivered by Bas Aarts, Raymond Hickey, Rafał Molencki, Maciej Piasecki and Anatol Stefanowitsch. The present volume contains a selection of those papers, which can be categorized into six broad corpus applications topical areas: language teaching, historical linguistics, media and political discourse, grammar and phraseology, computational tools and translation studies. Language teaching and learning In the opening paper Bas Aarts, Dan Clayton and Sean Wallis introduce a corpus-based platform used in the process of teaching the grammar of English to secondary school students in Britain. Štindlová, Rosen, Hana and Škodová investigate the usefulness of error annotation in a learner corpus of Czech, while Piotr Pęzik provides and overview of the PELCRA LEarner Corpus and some of the text mining tools developed within this project. The paper by Jersus Colmenares investigates the treatment of collocations in EFL textbooks used in Venezuela, and Jacek Waliński presents an online collaborative assessment environment developed within the CEFcult project. Corpora in historical linguistics In the first paper of this section Anna Cichosz describes the use of a parallel Latin-Old English corpus in word order studies, while Joanna Kopaczyk explores the use of repetitive patterns in early Scots legal and administrative texts. Media and political discourse Silvia de Candia, Mikołaj Deckert and Marco Venuti investigate the role of so-called accessed voice in British, Italian and Polish TV news reports using a comparable multilingual corpus of TV news transcripts. Katarzyna Fronczak-Bartnikowska conducts a corpus-based analysis of the discourse of the recent U.S. presidential election campaign. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Frauke Zeller discuss the contribution of corpus linguistics methods to the analysis of computer-mediated communication within the Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies COST Action IS0906. Grammar and phraseology Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski opens this section with a paper exploring the use of epistemic semantic sequences in academic legal discourse. Marcin Grygiel uses the Web as a corpus to investigate the status of affirmation modality in Serbian, while Renata Novotná’s paper is a comparison of the Polish equivalents of the Czech preposition na. The last paper in this section contributed by Milena Hebal-Jezierska analyses the phraseological profile of the lexemes used by Czechs to describe foreigners living in their country. Tools and services Karlheinz Moerth and Matej Durco describe their efforts to build a multipurpose corpus research service. Anelia Belogaý et al. present a suite of web-based tools and services for the management of digital contents and legal documents. Finally, Marcin Miłkowski overviews the quality assessment features of LanguageTool, an open-source proofreading package. Translation and localization The last section of this volume comprises five papers dealing with translation and localization problems. Belinda Maia and Rui Sousa-Silva evaluate the contribution of the Google Translate service to the world of professional translation. Łukasz Grabowski compares corpora of translational and non-translational literary Polish in search of evidence for translation universals. Natalia Quinteiro and Gabriel Quiroz analyze the level of phraseological equivalence in the English translation of Años de Soledad. Monika Czarnecka examines the use of CAT tools by Polish translators and Anna Bączkowska’s concluding paper explores the problem of signals of power in audio-visual translation. Acknowledgments This volume would not have been possible without the support and advice of professor Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk. Many thanks are also due to the members of the PALC 2011 committee including Anna Cichosz, Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski, Łukasz Dróżdż and Mikołaj Deckert, who offered their time to help with the organization of the conference. The preparation of this publication was co-financed by the Committee of Linguistics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Piotr Pęzik Creating Corpus-Driven Teaching and Learning Resources for Secondary School Grammar Teaching Bas Aarts, Dan Clayton and Sean Wallis Abstract In this article we describe a project at the Survey of English Usage, University College London which aims to build a web-based teaching and learning platform for teachers and students in secondary schools. The platform will consist of an interactive structured English language course with lesson modules, exercises, projects, etc. which dynamically access the parsed British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). We will show how the corpus can be used in delivering lesson materials in secondary school classrooms. Keywords Grammar, grammar teaching, corpora, language teaching in schools Introduction The English language plays a very important role in the British National Curriculum (NC). Great demands are made of teachers at secondary schools to teach complex linguistic and grammatical concepts, as laid down in the NC. They have understandable difficulties with this, given the very limited linguistic training they have received at teacher training college. The teachers’ students also have difficulties with learning complex grammatical concepts, because typically, in the tradition of grammar teaching, invented examples are used. Students find these difficult to relate to real linguistic settings and almost impossible to apply to their own language production. Regarding the lack of expertise in grammar teaching Hudson and Walmsley write: Most younger teachers know very little grammar and are suspicious of explicit grammar teaching. Not surprisingly, therefore, new recruits entering teacher-training courses typically either know very little grammar (Williamson and Hardman 1995) or have no confidence in their knowledge, presumably because they have picked it up in an unsystematic way (Cajkler and Hislam 2002). This situation raises obvious problems for the implementation of the official programme. (Hudson and Walmsley 2005: 616) To address these problems for teachers and students we decided to create specific tools for the teaching and learning of the English language based on the existing research of the Survey of English Usage (SEU) at University College London (UCL). The project Our goals in this project were to create a web-based teaching and learning platform for supporting the teaching of English grammar in secondary schools. The impetus was a recent review of secondary school grammar teaching, published by the British government in 2007, which concluded that teaching should make use of formal and informal English in different settings, and that grammar teaching must be driven by real examples. Another impetus was the article by Hudson and Walmsley already quoted above. They say: In the education system, the quality of government documents, the quality of teaching about language, and specifically the training of future teachers of English are all areas where standards could be raised by improving the quality of input from linguistics. (Hudson and Walmsley ibid.: 619) We took these observations to heart and constructed a web-based platform consisting of an interactive structured English language course, tailored to the goals of the British National Curriculum (Key Stages 3-5). It consists of lesson modules dynamically accessing a parsed corpus of English. The aims of the platform are to: translate our rich corpus resources into effective English language teaching tools and curriculum materials for teachers to use in the classroom, and provide pupils with high-quality web-based learning materials in both classroom and self-directed modes. There has been a long tradition in language teaching of using artificial, made-up examples to illustrate grammatical phenomena to school children. In the past this was a necessity, because no alternative resources were available. However, as the British government report from 2007 observes, students and teachers find the artificiality of these examples a barrier to their ability to get to grips with how grammar applies to real life. To quote a recent undergraduate textbook: Invented sentences like the ones so often used in textbooks are just sterile fragments of that wonderfully rich language they are supposed to be identifying. (Börjars and Burridge 2001: 9) In our web-based platform we overcome this problem by dynamically sourcing examples of English language phenomena in real settings from an underlying corpus. As noted above, our corpus is fully-parsed, and contains a very wide range of real contemporary English, both written and spoken, including informal conversations, formal speeches, spontaneous commentaries, interviews, radio discussions, academic, instructional and private writing (see Table 1). The spoken material has been transcribed word-for-word, and the audio data are available from the same web database. Hitherto our resources have only been used for academic research. We now make our research output available to a wider audience, specifically secondary schools. The dynamic selection of real language examples of grammatical phenomena has many potential benefits: Since the source material is independent from the teaching modules (the system design is modular and extensible), modules can easily be revised; A great deal of context and contextual information is available (e.g. the setting in which a conversation is conducted, who the speakers are, etc.), as well as audio material; Material can be selected for a particular student group or purpose (e.g. to teach students the features of formal English). The main beneficiaries of the project will be teachers and students of the English language in the local community, but we have a longer-term aim of producing a resource that is available across the world. Teachers will benefit from the availability of pre-written, but flexible and adaptable, courses and modules for building their own course plans. They will be able to access corpus materials, including texts and audio recordings. Students will benefit through the acquisition of grammatical concepts being made relevant to them through lessons and interactive hands-on exercises. We have found particular advantages in providing genuine, attested examples of language use for the exercises. Our exercise materials demonstrate that linguistic rules ‘work’. Repetition helps the student learn these rules, and with multiple examples populating exercises the student acquires the rules to improve their scores. They can see that these rules are applicable to their own and others’ language. We also aim to improve support in other ways. Teachers can monitor students’ progress, and can support their homework and their self-study. Teachers can decide on course modules and then select specific text genres to teach (formal/informal, spoken/written, etc.). They can also select material written by different authors in different periods and opt for different complexities of analysis. Teachers can select source materials and determine a set of possible lessons and exercises. The entire platform will be available over the internet from UCL and requires no additional software at the user’s end, aside from standard internet browser programs. This will enable the community in general, and teachers and students of English in particular, to gain access to the system. Project highlights In this section we showcase a few of the features of the new resource. We summarise these in terms of the seven ‘zones’ we have created, as shown in Figure 1 below. These zones intentionally overlap to some degree. The Grammar Zone The Grammar Zone is at the heart of the site and provides a comprehensive overview of the main areas of grammar, such as word classes, phrases and clauses, and how they are linked. The zone offers a concise, but complete, overview of the grammar of English. Figure 2 shows an example of a grammar lesson. We have developed technology for turning lessons on the site into a slideshow. These are not static PowerPoint projections, but can dynamically include examples taken from the corpus, exercises, videos and games. The Grammar Zone is organised through the Grammar topics menu (see Figure 2). Teachers and students can look at introductory explanations which feature interactive examples and self-testing tasks, before moving on to specific activities and lessons designed to highlight a particular area of grammar. For example, teachers can choose to look at ‘time and tense’ and find activities which help students be more consistent in their use of tenses when they write, or they can look for modal verbs and connect this topic with work students can do on the power of persuasive language. The Classroom Zone The Classroom Zone is the area for classroom activities, lesson plans and even whole schemes of work for teachers to use in 3-4 week periods of teaching. It is organised under two broad headings which allow teachers to find the most relevant resource(s) to suit their class very quickly. Firstly, we have teaching topics, which are areas of work which should be familiar to most teachers. In here users will find four areas: writing, reading, spoken language and investigating language. Each of these topics contains subtopics, such as ‘writing to inform’, ‘writing to persuade’, ‘analysing language choices’ and ‘analysing speech’, which will contain activities and lessons for that particular area. Teachers will also find some ready-made units of work with suggestions about how to approach particular topics such as ‘analysing spoken language’, ‘text messages’ and ‘the language of poetry’. These mini-schemes of work are designed to let students follow a path through a topic over a series of lessons. But teachers can also mix and match, selecting particular activities to use with one ability range and others to use with different students. For an example of a lesson plan on ‘Martian Grammar’, see Figure 3. The Project Zone The Project Zone is designed for investigative approaches to language. It encourages teachers and students to carry out investigations into a range of different language areas, such as using corpora to study grammatical patterns or to evaluate the language styles of men and women, exploring variations between Jamaican English and Standard English, or gathering media resources about different attitudes to language use. The Project Zone explains some of the basics of using a corpus, provides links to other corpora and sets up investigations for students to carry out in class and for coursework projects. Some of the projects are specifically designed to work with existing British A-level English Language specifications while others are designed to encourage younger students to start thinking in a way that helps them solve linguistic problems and set up suitable methodologies, a new approach for many English students. The Assessment Zone The Assessment Zone is designed to provide an area where students can test their own knowledge of grammar and the English language in general. The interactive exercises are grouped here under grammar topics. For example Figure 4 below shows an exercise on Verb Phrases. As we noted, examples are drawn from ICE-GB and other sources. We are currently looking at ways to use the scores from the Assessment Zone as a means of tracking student progress across key strands and substrands of the National Curriculum Standards. The Continuous Professional Development (CPD) Zone This is where teachers can access extended notes about particular lessons and activities. The idea behind the CPD Zone is that it will provide material that will allow teachers to become more confident in their understanding of grammar and how it might be made more relevant to their students. Along with lesson notes, ideas for schemes of work and approaches to different grammar and teaching topics, the CPD Zone also includes discussion pages where arguments and debates about grammar and how it is taught are addressed. For example, the material on usage takes a look at conflicting positions on dialects of English and their place in the classroom. The Resource Zone The Resource Zone provides extra support material for teachers and students, for example links to other language sites, databases of articles and suggestions for further reading. The Glossary Zone The Glossary Zone complements the Grammar Zone by providing a ‘quick grammar help’ facility on grammatical terms (see Figure 5). Glossary entries are automatically cross referenced and indexed. Teachers can click on words they are unsure of in the browsing view and pull down a quick glossary definition. Conclusion The resources that the Grammar for Schools site will offer once it is completed will, we believe, mark a sea change in the way that grammar is taught in schools. Teachers will be able to move from the static print-based texts that have been in use for centuries to dynamic materials available online. This will make grammar teaching and learning not only a worthwhile, but also an enjoyable and exciting experience. References Börjars, K. and K. Burridge (2001). Introducing English Grammar, Arnold: London. Cajkler, W. and J. Hislam (2002). “Trainee Teachers’ Grammatical Knowledge: The Tension Between Public Expectation and Individual Competence.” Language Awareness II. 161-177. Hudson, R. and J. Walmsley (2005). “The English Patient: English Grammar and Teaching in the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Linguistics 43 (3), 593-622. Williamson, J. and F. Hardman (1995) “Time for Refilling the Bath? A Study of Primary Student-teachers’ Grammatical Knowledge.” Language and Education 9, 117-134.