Language & Education Network - Bilingual Writers and Corpus Analysis: methodology and findings from the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus

Bilingual Writers and Corpus Analysis: methodology and findings from the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus

David Palfreyman (Zayed University, UAE)

Language corpora (large collections of digital text for computer analysis) are an important source of data about how language is used by people communicating in real situations – for example by scientists, by call-centre workers, by schoolchildren or by adult language learners. However, these corpora have tended to focus on one language at a time, and to ignore the fact that many people use more than one language in their daily life. In this talk I will discuss different types of corpora and how they can be used in research; then I will introduce a recently-developed type of corpus: the bilingual writer corpus. I will present examples and findings from one of the first such corpora: the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (http://www.zaebuc.org/), which includes writing by hundreds of students in both their languages, plus additional information about individual writers and texts. This freely available corpus enables researchers to investigate new kinds of research question, such as “How can we compare writers' proficiency between their first and second language, or assess their overall proficiency across their two languages – especially when the two languages are typologically very different?” and “Do people deploy similar metaphors when writing about the same topic in their L1 and in their L2?”