Introducing A-Level English Language students to empirical text study using the WebCorp Linguist's Search Engine

这项知识转移奖学金计划的目的是在中学阶段引入我们的WebCorp语言学家搜索引擎（WebCorpLSE），作为a -level英语教学的课程资源。近年来，学科标准越来越严格，要求对语言概念和分析技巧有更深入的理解，并越来越强调自主学习。我们建议的工作将为学生提供一种新颖的，最先进的教学和独立学习辅助工具，并将从语料库语言学领域的先前研究项目中获得的丰富的语言知识提炼成适合a -level学习的形式。语料库语言学是一门研究“语料库”（复数：“Corpus”）或电子文本集合的学科，旨在发现有关语言的新事实。英语研究与发展单位（r会费）使用语料库语言学方法来理解和描述使用中的语言，并应用这些知识。在过去的20年里，我们进行了一系列的研究项目来研究语言的变化状态，研究新词、新词的含义和单个单词流行程度的变化（详见http://rdues.bcu.ac.uk/）。现代语料库语言学研究一直受到语料库创建成本和时间尺度的限制。当这些语料库可用时，它们几乎是历史文物。当万维网在90年代出现时，r会费团队意识到网络文本将允许对当前用法的图片进行微调，并提供对现有语料库中缺失的语言方面和领域的访问。我们的WebCorp项目（http://www.webcorp.org.uk）有效地从web文本中提取语言信息，并向用户提供格式清晰的语言输出。它的弱点是依赖商业搜索引擎作为网络的看门人，长期的解决方案是开发一个大规模的网络搜索引擎来直接访问网络的文本内容，这一点一直很清楚。这是通过WebCorpLSE的开发实现的，它可以直接访问100亿字的文本语料库，包括一个多tb的“迷你网络”，一个报纸子语料库，以及博客和文学作品的子语料库。目前，语料库语言学方法很少在大学预科阶段使用，如果有的话。A-level的学生除了Microsoft Word中的拼写/语法检查器之外，大部分都不了解或无法使用许多自动分析工具。我们计划通过向A-level学生介绍WebCorpLSE来丰富他们的学习经验。通过这种方式，他们将学习语料库语言学技术应用于他们的语言学习和独立研究项目。WebCorpLSE还将为教师和学生提供丰富的真实语言数据，与a -level教学大纲的各个方面相关。拟议的知识交流过程包括与当地合作学校合作，为新受众优化我们的方法，开发新的功能，搜索界面和相关的学习材料，以响应教师和学生的持续反馈。评估和传播结果将是我们活动的核心，我们将朝着使WebCorpLSE成为全国a -level英语学生的有用资源的长期目标而努力。我们提出的工作与英国目前的研究政策之间将产生协同作用，包括改善学术界以外的研究成果的交流和利用，对未来几代研究人员的投资，以及对关键技术的快速采用，以造福英国经济。

The aim of this Knowledge Transfer Fellowship proposal is to introduce our WebCorp Linguist's Search Engine (WebCorpLSE) at secondary school level as a curriculum resource for the teaching of A-level English Language. In recent years, the subject criteria have been tightened, requiring more in-depth understanding of linguistic concepts and analytical techniques, and with an increased emphasis on independent learning. Our proposed work will provide students with access to a novel, state-of-the-art teaching and independent learning aid, and distil a wealth of linguistic knowledge, gained from previous research projects in the field of Corpus Linguistics, into a form appropriate for A-level study. Corpus Linguistics is the study of a 'corpus' (plural: 'corpora'), or collection of electronic texts, to discover new facts about the language. The Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) uses corpus linguistic methods to understand and describe language in use, and to apply this knowledge. We have over the last 20 years undertaken a series of research projects to examine the changing state of the language, looking at new words, new meanings and changes in the popularity of individual words (see http://rdues.bcu.ac.uk/ for details).Modern corpus linguistic research has been constrained by the cost and timescale entailed in the creation of corpora. By the time these corpora are available, they are almost historical artefacts. When the World Wide Web emerged in the nineties, the RDUES team realised that web text would allow the fine-tuning of the picture of current usage, and provide access to aspects and domains of language missing from existing corpora. Our WebCorp project (http://www.webcorp.org.uk) extracted linguistic information from web text efficiently, and presented the user with clearly formatted linguistic output. Its weakness was its reliance on commercial search engines as gatekeepers to the web, and it was always clear that the long-term solution would be to develop a large-scale web search engine to give direct access to the textual content of the web. This was achieved through the development of WebCorpLSE, which gives direct access to a 10 billion word text corpus, including a multi-terabyte 'mini-web', a newspaper sub-corpus, and sub-corpora of blogs and literary works. At present, the corpus linguistic approach is rarely employed at pre-university level, if at all. A-level students do not, for the most part, have understanding of or access to many automated analysis tools beyond the spelling/grammar checker in Microsoft Word. We plan to enrich the learning experience of A-level students by introducing them to WebCorpLSE. Through this, they will learn to apply corpus linguistic techniques to their language studies and their independent research projects. WebCorpLSE will also provide teachers and their students with a plentiful supply of authentic language data, relevant to all aspects of the A-level syllabus. The proposed knowledge exchange process involves working with a local partner school to optimise our approach for this new audience, developing new functionality, search interfaces and associated learning materials in response to ongoing feedback from teachers and students. Evaluation and dissemination of findings will be central to our activities, and we shall be working toward a longer term aim of making WebCorpLSE a useful resource for A-level English Language students nationwide.There will be synergy between our proposed work and current UK research policy, in terms of improved communication and exploitation of findings outside academia, in the investment in future generations of researchers, and in the rapid take-up of key technologies for the benefit of the UK economy.