The BYU Corpora bank, which of course includes COCA, has added a new, 14 billion word corpus. I haven’t looked at it in detail yet, but it seems to have a lot of useful new search features. There is an overview here: https://corpus.byu.edu/iweb/help/iweb_overview.pdf.
I may update this note later after I’ve played with the interface a bit more.
A multilingual (CfP in 5 languages) conference on DDL will be held on September 27-28 in Torino, Italy. The conference website is available here, and the CfP can be downloaded from this page.
This is an excerpt from the English CfP (bold emphasis in the original):
Researchers and teachers are invited to submit proposals discussing theoretical implications and practical applications of DDL in foreign language classes and in CLIL contexts.
Since one of the aims of the Conference is to reach out to the teachers in primary and secondary education, participants are also invited to deliver practical workshops and/or share their experience and examples of good practices with the other participants.
Other info
Please follow the links above for details about submissions, registration, and other conference matters.
In addition to the burst of recent research articles, there are a couple journals putting out CfPs for corpora-related topics.
JCADS is the Journal of Corpora & Discourse Studies. It’s new and will be publishing its first issue in the summer of 2018. The prior link is to the CfP posted on Facebook, submission info is here.
Études en Didactique des Langues (EDL) will publish a special issue on didactic (instructional) uses of corpora. The link is to a French-language page, but if you don’t read French, don’t worry, you can find a PDF of the CfP in both French and English in the list of documents. If you have trouble figuring out which document it is, the date on the document is 17/09/2017.
And finally, not a corpus-related issue, but an interesting (to me) special issue nonetheless, The Language Learning Journal put out a CfP for an issue focusing on the use of video and other audio-visual material.
Two large, open-access* corpora have recently been released.
Go here to learn about and get access to the Spoken BNC2014, and go here to learn about and get access to the EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT). EFCAMDAT is a learner corpus featuring essays from adult learners of English around the world, and this is its second, bigger release. Spoken BNC2014 is brand new (to the public), and, as you may very well be aware, is being described as “the largest ever public collection of transcribed British conversations“.
I don’t have anything too special to say. These both look like terrific resources. I think all who are interested should check them out.
*with registration
This seems to keep getting delayed / postponed. Perhaps not enough submissions? Perhaps not enough appropriate submissions. I don’t know. But if you were thinking of writing something, but got too busy or didn’t finish in time, then Good News, the new deadline is September 3rd.
TESOL International Association is seeking submissions for a volume about classroom applications of corpora.
They are looking for straightforward, practical things that can be done with corpora.
I think the deadline was originally in the middle of May, but it seems to have been extended to July 15.
Check out the link above for more info about what kinds of submissions are appropriate and how to submit.
Corpus Linguistics 4 EFL 