On 18th July 2018, we held a three-hour practical workshop on ‘Using corpora to teach sociolinguistics’ at the 13th Teaching and Language Corpora conference hosted by Cambridge University. The workshop focused on the use of our two key resources, #LancsBox and BNClab to teach about current use of spoken British English and social factors that play a role in the language used by the speakers. The workshop was delivered by Dana Gablasova, Vaclav Brezina with assistance from Irene Marin Cervantes and Tanjun Liu. You can read more about the workshop in the abstract below.

Abstract

Teaching sociolinguistics both in the L1 and the L2 contexts presents a challenge. It involves pedagogical considerations about how to best draw students’ attention to the fact of linguistic variation (cf. Meyerhoff 2011; Brezina & Meyerhoff 2014) as well as practical concerns such as finding resources (data, teaching materials etc.) suitable for classroom use. At the same time, sociolinguistic awareness and competence are becoming increasingly important both in L1 (e.g. A level English Language, AQA 2014) and L2 contexts (e.g. Geeslin & Long 2014; Sung 2016). This workshop offers a discussion of the role of sociolinguistics in the classroom as well as practical examples of corpus tools and materials designed to help analyse and teach about language variation. The following topics will be covered:

• Discussing language variation in the classroom
• Presenting and visualising corpus data
• Useful corpus tools
• The Spoken BNC 1994 and 2014 and other corpora of contemporary British English
• Creating teaching materials

The workshop will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners.The participants will be introduced to corpus tools such as #LancsBox and BNC Lab, both recently developed at Lancaster University, which allow efficient exploration of corpora in the classroom. The workshop will offer an introduction to new data analysis and visualisation techniques, which the participants will be able to apply in their specific educational contexts. The workshop will also focus on the development of corpus-based teaching materials – multiple practical examples of effective teaching materials will be provided.

References

AQA (2014). AS and A-level English Language. aqa.org.uk/7702.

Brezina, V., & Meyerhoff, M. (2014). Significant or random. A critical review of sociolinguistic generalisations based on large corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 19(1), 1-28.

Geeslin, K. L., & Long, A. Y. (2014). Sociolinguistics and second language acquisition: Learning to use language in context. Routledge.

Meyerhoff, M. (2011). Introducing sociolinguistics. London: Routledge.

Sung, C. C. M. (2016). Exposure to multiple accents of English in the English Language Teaching classroom: from second language learners’ perspectives. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 10(3), 190-205.