Abstract
Over the last couple of decades, there have been many studies on the utility of data-driven learning
(DDL) approaches to the acquisition of English and other Indo-European languages. Very little
research has touched on DDL for Chinese, or indeed any corpus-based approaches to learning it. This
is surprising, given the otherwise large choice of IT applications, including flashcards, online
dictionaries, and stroke order practice software: certainly, it seems, people do wish to learn Chinese
with computers.
Certain features of the Chinese language make it especially suited to a data-driven approach. In DDL,
learners typically explore collocational and colligational patterns among words, but would not expect
to be able to look at the internal structure of words using a corpus tool. The logographic Chinese
writing system, however, allows the learner to investigate the ways that characters/morphemes pattern
to form words.
We offered several corpus-based tasks to intermediate-level Mandarin learners, alongside
traditional-communicative conversation classes. We describe these tasks, as well as some of the
corpora and corpus interfaces used in our approach
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 2011 |
Event | The Asian Conference on Technology in the Classroom 2011 - Osaka, Japan Duration: 10 Jun 2011 → 12 Jun 2011 |
Conference
Conference | The Asian Conference on Technology in the Classroom 2011 |
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Country/Territory | Japan |
City | Osaka |
Period | 10/06/11 → 12/06/11 |