Reviews intellectual and analytical and, therefore, appropriate to only certain learning styles. Furthermore, as social learning and communicative models of teaching become the dominant teaching paradigms, one may perceive a shift away from strict language analysis. Textbook publishers also seem reticent to produce more corpus‐informed materials. They may be waiting for concrete indications that users (teachers and students) are ready for such materials. They may also be waiting for additional research in support of corpus‐driven materials. However, perhaps corpus‐informed teaching materials should not be seen as distinct or separate from existing pedagogies, but rather as complementary to them. It can be also argued that, when integrated into the pedagogy, corpus materials should interest a substantial number of students whose learning style tends to analysis. The contribution of this volume is that it provides both a rich context for using corpora in language teaching and learning, as well as points the way to future uses. It is an important volume that will be useful for both teachers and researchers. ROBERT ARIEW University of Arizona
GILQUIN, GAËTANALLE, SYLVIE DE COCK, & SYLVIANE GRANGER. (Eds.). LINDSEI: Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. Louvain, Belgium: UCL Presses, 2010. Pp. ix, 111. $257.75, paper and CD–ROM (single site license). ISBN 978–2–87463–245–7.
LINDSEI is a well‐designed spoken English learner corpus or database that comes with an informative handbook and a CD–ROM containing fully marked‐up data integrated into a search interface. Unlike most second language (L2) learner corpora, which are composed of data from L2 learners of only one target language and one native language (L1), LINDSEI consists of systematically collected comparable data from English as a foreign language (EFL) learners of 11 different L1s, including Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish. Equally important, LINDSEI includes many useful searchable variables, such as interview variables (e.g., genre and tasks), learner variables (e.g., age and proficiency), and interviewer variables (e.g., gender and L1). Given that the contents and functions of LINDSEI are fully
643 and systematically presented in its handbook, this review is centered and organized around the handbook. The LINDSEI handbook consists of two parts: part 1 “Description of the Corpus” with four sections, and part 2 “LINDSEI User Manual” with six sections. Section 1 of part 1 gives a clear introduction of LINDSEI, including its historical background, overall design criteria, and the procedures and methods used for data transcription and markup. In addition, the section gives the rationales for the development of LINDSEI and for the inclusion of the variables selected, as well as the reasons for calling LINDSEI a database instead of a corpus: None of the LINDSEI data was truly natural, authentic language gathered from real communication in life (an established key criterion for language data to qualify as a corpus). The section ends with a description of the codes used for the data markup, as well as a justification of the minimalist transcription approach adopted in the study—to make the data accessible and useful to researchers of diverse interests and purposes. Section 2 presents the teams involved in the development of LINDSEI: the coordinating team, the technology team, and the 11 national teams that helped collect and transcribe the EFL learner data from their respective countries. Section 3 describes the structure of LINDSEI, including breakdown information of the 11 (L1) subcorpora, including the number of texts and words, the number of words by task/data type, and demographic information on the EFL speakers in each subcorpus. Section 4, titled “Methodology,” discusses how LINDSEI can be used for research on EFL learner language, how it compares with its sister corpus ICLEv2 (a written learner corpus of essentially the same size and design), and how it may be used with other corpora (both native and learner corpora) for intra‐ and intercorpus comparative studies. This section is useful for EFL and English as a second language (ESL) researchers and teachers alike (particularly those new to the field) who would like to use LINDSEI for research or teaching purposes. Section 1 of part 2 briefly describes the purpose of part 2, as well as the contents and structure of the LINDSEI CD–ROM and how the learner data in LINDSEI can be accessed. Section 2 covers license agreement issues. Section 3 explains how to install LINDSEI. Sections 4 “The REQUEST Window” and 5 “The RESULT Window” are the two most important sections in part 2, because they deal with how to
644 access the corpus data and how to generate search results using the interface provided. Using illustrative screenshots, section 4 describes how the search interface allows users to select and search the corpus data by variables including the three major variables (interview/learner/interviewer) and the sub‐variables under each major variable. A useful feature of the interface is the zoom function, which enables users easily to select, view, and sort information in a selection list. Most important, one can use the search interface to build, from the LINDSEI data, a corpus of one’s own choice based on specific research questions or purposes. However, one cannot use the interface to query and analyze language usage patterns in the corpus (i.e., no concordancing or query of frequency of lexical items and grammatical structures is possible). This limitation is perhaps the only weakness of LINDSEI. One can, though, use any of the common corpus retrieval/analysis programs, such as WordSmith and MonoConc Pro, to conduct language usage‐related queries in the corpus. Section 5 explains how the search results are displayed and how the results can be selected and deselected by variables. The section also describes how to generate a report based on the query criteria and how to use the statistics function in the interface to compute basic statistics, such as frequency counts and distribution of texts, in terms of percentages in the selected corpus. A test of all the aforementioned functions of LINDSEI by the reviewer indicates that the descriptions of the various functions of the corpus in the handbook are accurate and that LINDSEI is, overall, a user‐friendly corpus with many useful functions. In summary, because of its data representativeness, thoughtful design, and useful search interface, LINDSEI is an excellent addition to L2 learner corpora. It makes an important contribution both to learner corpus building and to the study of learner language in general. DILIN LIU University of Alabama
VIANA, VANDER, SONYA ZYNGIER, & GEOFF BARBROOK. (Eds.). Perspectives on Corpus Linguistics. Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2011. Pp. xvi, 256. $143.00, cloth. ISBN 978–9–02720–353–3.
Perspectives on Corpus Linguistics presents a unique introduction to this area through a series of interviews with researchers and practitioners.
The Modern Language Journal 96 (2012) Titles of the interviews illustrate the topics included here, such as, “Applied Corpus Linguistics and the Learning Experience,” “Corpus Linguistics in South America,” “A Multilingual Outlook of Corpora Studies,” and “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies.” But one might be cautious before investing in such a book to see whether it responds to questions closest to the concerns of foreign language educators, such as whether the use of corpus linguistics can improve foreign language teaching, how teachers and materials writers can use best use corpus linguistics procedures, and whether corpora are available to students and their instructors. The book consists of 14 interviews with linguists in the emerging field of corpus linguistics. In each interview, the interviewees identify issues in research, and then focus on gains and losses in this work. The editors point out that they want their subjects to identify what can be achieved by the use of corpora and what is still missing. Three of the interviews may be of special interest to MLJ readers. The first is “Applied Corpus Linguistics and the Learning Experience,” an interview with Guy Aston from the University of Bologna. In discussing the use of corpora with language teaching, Aston notes that “in teaching and learning… we would arguably like corpora to be representative of the textual population which language learners need to deal with, but at the same time to be ones whose use will help promote learning” (p. 4). However, he adds that when working with a transcript, the analyst may have no idea of what is going on in the original context. Aston notes that a major strength of corpus analysis is the discovery of patterns that may have eluded researcher intuition. He gives as an example the recent work on multiword phrasal units such as proverbs, “which are regularly varied and abbreviated to match the particular context, and rarely occur in prototypical form, which the addressee is assumed to be able to retrieve from a partial citation” (p. 8). While asserting the value of corpus studies, Aston concludes by noting prominent lacks in corpus studies, such as the absence of a corpus of aligned speech corpora, from which learners could find examples of actual speech usage. Another is the dearth of corpora for parallel translation corpora, which could be used in highlighting cross‐language contrasts and thus “mak[e] foreign language data more readily comprehensible” (p. 15). Davies, Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics at Brigham Young University is involved in corpora studies in Spanish and Portuguese. Davies