Yejin Jung and Corpus Linguistics at the First LAS PechaKucha

Yejin Jung, postdoctoral scholar in the Second Language Teaching & Research Center (L2TReC), represented the College of Humanities at the inaugural LAS (Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences) PechaKucha with a presentation about second language acquisition and corpus research. A PechaKucha is a super-condensed storytelling format where speakers have 400 seconds to present their topic, accompanied by 20 image-forward slides that advance automatically every 20 seconds.

Jung addressed the ethical, practical, and logistical issues that researchers face in accessing authentic data about how humans learn new languages, especially from young language learners. Language corpora offer a solution to this, allowing researchers to identify patterns and relationships that otherwise would be impossible to see. 

A corpus, she explained, is “a large scale collection of text processed in a machine readable format.” L2TReC houses two such corpora – CUDLI and MuSSeL – both based on second language learners in Utah’s extensive Dual Language Immersion programs in K-12 schools. CUDLI (the Corpus of Utah Dual Language Immersion) is a collection of writing from students who are learning a variety of languages, and MuSSeL (Multilingual Corpus of Second Language Speech) includes spoken language.

In Jung’s PechaKucha, she gave examples of how corpus research allows scholars to identify “patterns that occur in real life language use and relationships between words.” This allows us to develop better understandings of the language learning process as it unfolds in real time.  For example, corpus research makes it possible for scholars to pinpoint times that students are likely to struggle or plateau in their process. Partnerships between the U of U and K-12 education means that teachers can adjust their classroom practices rapidly to improve learning outcomes for students.

Since PechaKuchas are naturally brief, you can learn more about CUDLI, MuSSeL, and corpus linguistics research on L2TReC’s website! Congratulations to Yejin on a great presentation.

More LAS PechaKuchas will be coming in Spring semester. Stay tuned for more details!