Building and Investigating a Written Corpus of Japanese Junior High School Learners
Abstract
This paper discusses the process of using corpus linguistic tools to analyze student writing. For this paper, a whole semester of writing samples produced by Japanese junior high students was collected to create a learner corpus. These will then be analyzed to determine if there are any consistent needs can be discovered which can aid the teacher in making appropriate pedagogical decisions, concerning choices of lexis, grammar, and pragmatics.
The corpus will then be compared with not only native speaker corpora but with other available Japanese learner corpora to determine how typical or atypical the learners are when they are scrutinized with the data of other students with a similar L1 background.
The presenter will first discuss the process of gathering data, introduce tools available which can be all found online or as freeware and then share some insights based on the some preliminary findings.
TESOL_Peter 