From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu

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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman

Author makes case for data-driven language learning

LAWRENCE – You could consider Nina Vyatkina an evangelist for data-driven learning and open educational resources as they apply to helping students learn a second language.

The case for the synergistic benefits of those two approaches and the results of a new study demonstrating their effectiveness form the content of Vyatkina’s new book, “Corpus Applications in Language Teaching and Research: The Case of Data-Driven Learning of German” (Routledge, 2024).

The University of Kansas professor of German and applied linguistics is a believer in students directly using collections of word usage – corpora – to help them understand and gain fluency in their target language.

“Simply put, a corpus is a curated assembly of naturally occurring texts chosen to represent a specific state or variant of a language,” Vyatkina said. “That’s still a mouthful, but the notion of corpora goes way, way back in literary scholarship.

“A great example of a corpus is the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary. They wanted to have not only a list of words and their definitions, but usage examples. So in 1880, James Murray, the first editor-in-chief, put out the call to submit sentences with the words collected from books and over the years had collected millions of slips of paper, which he stored in something the size of a garden shed. And that was a prototype of our contemporary corpus.

“Of course, with modern electronics, this all became much, much easier,” Vyatkina said.

A popular corpus that Vyatkina cites as groundbreaking for its time (it debuted in 2008) and still useful today is COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English – which ranks and cross-references billions of words taken from newspapers, books, TV, webpages, etc., between 1990 and 2019. COCA has a user interface much like a Google search. For instance, learners of English can search to see which adjective — “big” or “large” — pairs most commonly – and thus best – with the noun “problem,” which will help them use English more idiomatically.

But not all corpora are so well-organized as COCA, Vyatkina said. Nor are there as many useful corpora for languages other than English (LOTE), even if one accounts for the smaller number of LOTE speakers. Nor were there many useful teaching guides to using these LOTE corpora, Vyatkina wrote.

So her book is an attempt to bridge all those divides.

“One part is a survey of what has been done in teaching German with this method and research on the effectiveness of teaching with this method,” the author said. “I have a new empirical study. I actually did use this method with KU students of German … and it turned out to be very effective, and students liked the method.

“Then the final part is the introduction of the open educational resource,” Vyatkina said.

In cooperation with the KU Open Language Resource Center, Vyatkina and co-author Schirin Kourehpaz, a multiterm lecturer in German language, published in 2020 a free online course titled Incorporating Corpora with links to active German corpora, making their use seamless to the teacher and student.

“You have exercises, lesson plans, explanations to teachers how to use it, and then you can click on links and you will be taken directly to the corpus, and that is what is needed for teachers and learners to use it,” Vyatkina said.

The proof this method’s success, she said, is in faster, better language acquisition.

“This is why we call it data-driven learning,” Vyatkina said, “because this teaching method is a little different from what we think of as traditional teaching, where the teacher presents a rule, and then the learners practice using the language. Here, it is the opposite procedure. They look at the examples first, and then, under the teacher’s guidance, they infer a rule or a pattern.”

Vyatkina also believes that the proven success of data-driven learning in acquiring German can be repeated with other languages and perhaps other fields.

“Absolutely,” Vyatkina said. “I review a lot of research that has been done on other languages, and I try to make this connection in every chapter of my book.”

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KU News Service

1450 Jayhawk Blvd.

Lawrence KS 66045

Phone: 785-864-3256

Fax: 785-864-3339

[email protected]

http://www.news.ku.edu

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs

From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu

Headlines

Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman

Literary inquiry explores legacy of poet, journalist Frank Marshall Davis

LAWRENCE – Frank Marshall Davis was virtually lost to the canon of African American poets when he left the 48 contiguous states for the Territory of Hawaii in 1948. Twenty-five years later, he would be discovered and brought back to the mainland to an appreciative audience of students at several historically Black colleges and universities. In new work, a University of Kansas professor emeritus of English maintains that the time is right for rediscovering Davis again.

At the invitation of the prestigious Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, John Edgar Tidwell assembled a portfolio on Davis. It consists of Tidwell’s essay “Weaving Jagged Words into Song,” an excerpt of a long interview he conducted with Davis, a sheaf of Davis’ poetry, photographs of Davis and a remembrance of Davis by his daughter Beth Charlton.

Although separated by generations, both Davis and Tidwell were both born and reared in southern Kansas: Davis in Arkansas City and Tidwell in Independence. Tidwell’s lengthy essay on Davis for The Dictionary of Literary Biography propelled him on the path to editing Davis’ memoirs, his collected poems and a selection of his news writing.

A consistent theme in Davis’ journalism – he wrote for the African American press in the mid-20th century — and a fair share of his poetry is the writer’s responsibility to engage social issues. But this doesn’t mean being strident, propagandistic or declamatory. Instead, as he described himself: “Since I am blues-oriented, I try to be as direct as good blues. This implies social commentary.”

His characterization often confounded and confused his critics. They seemed unable to separate his leftist politics from his vision of art, Tidwell said. Consequently, they branded him as “unpoetic” or “bitter.” But, as Tidwell wrote, “Davis found interesting ways of weaving jagged words into song.”

It was probably this quality that endeared him to the younger generation of students and insurgent writers who embraced the tenets of the 1970s Black Arts Movement, Tidwell said. They saw in Davis’ poetry precursors of their ideas about an aesthetic committed to transforming Black cultural norms and perceptions into a more dignified racial representation. “Black Man’s Verse,” Davis’ first collection of poems, was inspirational in that respect. Seeing him as a literary forefather, they discovered, offered a broader perspective of their project. Instead of inaugurating a decidedly new approach to art, they now understood they were part of a continuing historical narrative.

Davis was not always so highly regarded. A few writers attempted to distort his background into a negative representation. For example, as he was about to leave Hawaii for undergraduate study in California, young Barack Obama, then called “Barry,” sought advice from Davis about the politics of racial identity. Obama detractors would later draw upon Davis’ 1940s closet membership in the Communist Party to misrepresent this inquiry as an occasion for communist mentoring.

Others would offer the baseless claim that Davis was actually Obama’s father. While neither assertion was true, both gained currency and were widely discussed as if they were credible.

“Given the political environment in which we now live,” Tidwell said, “Davis’ art and imagination are as relevant today as they were in the 1940s and 1970s. Davis engaged public discourse and public politics in enlightening ways.

“Today, we see a resurgence of social practices that defined the era of Jim Crow. Voter suppression, the erosion of personal liberties, anti-immigration campaigns and much more have launched assaults on our very personhood. If the past has anything to teach us, we can learn from Frank Marshall Davis’ efforts to reclaim our humanity from those who would seek to deny us.”

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KU News Service

1450 Jayhawk Blvd.

Lawrence KS 66045

Phone: 785-864-3256

Fax: 785-864-3339

[email protected]

http://www.news.ku.edu

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs