- Email: [email protected]
Corpus linguistics in Chinese contexts
118
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
English language and its speakers’ cultures. These two chapters overall also highlight the concern of some scholars in viewing English and its expansion as a cultural threat for its learners because their cultural attitudes might be re-shaped as a result of exposure to values introduced through the new language. In the next chapter, Christine Manara elaborates on her own experiences as an English language teacher in presenting and discussing cultural values with learners from various educational backgrounds in Australia. Issues of diverse ideologies and the question of mono-lingualism are said to cause struggles and contradictions among teachers and learners of English. Additionally, the author believes that the type of learner and institution must be taken into consideration in understanding aspects of EIL teaching in different social settings. Reading an English teacher's lived experiences of conflicts and challenges is a fruitful way of attempting to create awareness on the part of practicing teachers about the complexity of EIL teaching and learning. Andrew Pollard focuses on linguistic imperialism and the so-called prestigious varieties of English in his chapter. To clarify this concept, he reports a study on the perceptions of a Korean learner of English in the selection of a variety of English to learn. The author argues that the educational aims behind the expansion of English need to be considered with regard to learners' attitudes about their own culture. The next two chapters, one by James D'Angelo and the other by Ram Ashish Giri and Joseph Ming Shyuh Foo, both discuss aspects of EIL teaching in Japan. It appears that unlike Korea which emphasizes learning different varieties of English, in Japan, educators employ native speakers and trust their methodologies and materials instead of local ones which are based on the local culture. The authors emphasize that localization and globalization need to be considered in EIL teaching policies and practices as integral entities. Finally, the Epilogue by Ahmar Mahboob provides a recap of the main concerns of the book and focuses on the centrality of understanding varieties of English in these concerns. While the individual papers are based on different approaches, the book as a whole provides readers with a shared emphasis on the importance of considering cultures in exploring issues related to EIL. In addition, contributors stress that there is no standard version of English, which is why grammar books do not seem accurate benchmarks of the ‘right’ English. However, as Mahboob states, the volume has mainly focused on the social functions of EIL while the linguistic aspects of English varieties must also be taken into account. Overall, in spite of questions that might be asked about the limited geographical and socio-cultural scope of the contributions, the over-detailed research reports in some chapters, and some structuring and presentation problems in the volume, the book does successfully highlight the place of cultural understandings in English language education worldwide. The main goal of the volume, that is, elaboration on the contextualities of EIL, is obviously achieved. While not free of shortcomings, this book is recommended to those who are concerned with research on English language learning and teaching as well as teachers of English to speakers of other languages. Farnoosh Rashed Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2016.06.014
Corpus linguistics in Chinese contexts, Bin Zou, Simon Smith, Michael Hoey (Eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK (2015). xxiii þ 203 pp.
Over the past few decades, the greater accessibility and improved capability of computers has accelerated the application of corpus linguistics, which has been extended to wide-ranging linguistic explorations by an increasing number of scholars around the world. Covering research presented at the international conference on Corpus Technologies and Applied Linguistics (CTAL-2012) held at Xi'an JiaotongeLiverpool University (XJTLU), China, Bin Zou, Simon Smith, and Michael Hoey's jointly-edited collection, Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts, provides a timely opportunity for practitioners in corpus linguistics worldwide to become familiar with the current exciting developments brought to language studies in China by the corpus approach. Along with the Introduction, the collection includes nine chapters on corpus-informed research: the first three pertaining to Chinese language analysis or cross-linguistic inquiries into Chinese and English and the next six showcasing English language investigation. Thematically, Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 9 can be distinguished from the remaining pedagogy-oriented chapters for their commitment to general linguistic issues. The introductory chapter (Li, Smith) outlines not only the important developments in Chinese language corpus construction from around the 2nd century A.D. to the present day, but also the evolution and achievements of studies in English corpora in China, with a focus on the compilation of Chinese learner English corpora, which have fuelled an explosive nationwide growth in research on English as a Foreign Language (EFL). However, Chinese language corpora constructed in Hong Kong and Taiwan are conspicuously absent from this conspectus (for a comprehensive review, see Feng, 2006).
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
119
In Chapter 1, Hoey and Shao use lexical priming theory, as developed by Michael Hoey, to reveal aspects of collocation, colligation and semantic association exhibited by two typologically unrelated languages, English and Chinese. The findings provide preliminary evidence that the priming apparatus seems applicable to Chinese data as well, suggesting that the theory's psycholinguistic claims are not language-specific. Admittedly, the investigation is confined to certain Chinese characters, and a greater breadth and depth of analysis is essential to justify the generalizability of the study's findings. The main contribution of this study lies in the theoretical value attached to corpus linguistics, indicating that it is not a theory-free approach. Chapter 2 (Xiao) presents another cross-linguistic observation of English and Chinese, with passive constructions and classifiers at the core of the investigation. Based on data extracted from two balanced, comparable written corpora and two spoken corpora of the language pair, the author compares the distribution patterns of two Chinese structures to their counterparts in English at different levels (e.g., overall frequencies, semantic/syntactic features) and obtains some interesting results. For example, counter to assertions that Chinese is a language of classifiers while English is not, the two languages share some striking qualitative similarities in their use of classifiers, though they differ quantitatively. In addition to the successful incorporation of quantitative and qualitative analyses, another merit of this chapter is its proposition for an integrated novel model of “contrastive corpus linguistics” for future research, offering significant potential for linking studies of corpus, translation and second language acquisition and expanding their collective research scope. For those with a particular appetite for corpus-assisted teaching or learning Chinese, Chapter 3 (Kilgarriff, Keng, and Smith) is a real feast. It probes the Sketch Engine's pedagogical exploitation, exemplifying how the core functions of this software (e.g., concordances, Word Sketches, thesaurus and Sketch Differences) enable meaningful searches into language use and thereby help learners acquire a better understanding of the meanings and collocations of Chinese words; for example, a one-page Word Sketch summary of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour might offer users an interesting and efficient way of learning that word. In Chapter 4, Liang posits that each section of any text in the same genre may have its own rhetorical idiosyncrasy of phraseologies, which has been insufficiently examined through corpus linguistics and genre analysis. To address this lacuna, he advances corpus software, the TextSmith Tools, and illustrates how it can be deployed to distinguish targeted lexicogrammatical features across different sections of sample academic articles in Applied Linguistics. As an exploratory study, it establishes the potential value of this powerful tool for genre analysis. Chapter 5 (He) presents a good example of implementing “corpus pedagogic processing”, which advocates the direct use of corpus data for pedagogical purposes. In this approach, university students learn to perform corpus searches, identifying phrasal verbs of pedagogical relevance and analysing their distributions and patterns; subsequently, they transfer the corpus data to EFL multimedia courseware used in Chinese middle schools. The results suggest that aligning corpus use with EFL activities is feasible and effective; furthermore, it enhances EFL teaching and learning at both second and tertiary levels, thus serving as an impetus for further pursuit. Both Chapters 6 (Peng) and 7 (Zou, Peng) highlight the value of corpus analysis in probing academic writing by EFL learners from XJTLU (a university in mainland China that features English-medium instruction) while focusing on different linguistic issues. Chapter 6 diagnoses the problems underlying students' use of countable/uncountable nouns. Comparison proves that the differences in the misuse of the targeted nouns between Chinese learners and native English speakers are statistically significant, and the author underlines the necessity of corpus research being applied to offer students more exposure to authentic materials. The author also counsels that dictionaries should be treated as descriptive rather than prescriptive, with practical examples demonstrating that the language use presented in dictionaries sometimes fails to adequately reflect native speakers' real use. Chapter 7 shifts the focus to conjunctions. On the basis of corpus data regarding students from XJTLU, nine other Chinese universities, and three British universities, the study reveals that, after one year of learning, XJTLU students bore more resemblance to British students than to their Chinese counterparts with respect to their use of conjunctions. Chapter 8 (Wang, Zheng and Cai) adopts an approach of straddling corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, and assesses the pedagogical potential of corpus techniques for EFL students' reading enhancement, whereby students in an experimental class participate in compiling a reading corpus, selecting and tagging texts and presenting textual analysis. Notably, students' feedback on the presented method's effectiveness is also considered for assessment. However, a more comprehensive elucidation of the results of the students' analysis, the pre-/post-tests and the questionnaire data might arguably have enriched this study's contribution to future empirical practice. Chapter 9 (Mei, Zhang and Yu) employs Appraisal Theory, with three parallel subsystems (attitude, engagement and graduation), to identify appraisal features in the reports about Chinese military affairs from the New York Times, embodying an interaction between quantitative and qualitative analyses. The convincing argument brings to light the reporters' less overt stance and evaluation. While the corpus is limited in scope owing to the time-consuming manual annotation process, some pioneering attempts (e.g., Read & Carroll, 2012) have been made to tackle this challenge: (semi-)automatic annotation tools that may prove useful in future inquiries. This volume, with most chapters (co-)authored by leading national and international corpus linguists, attempts to encapsulate the most salient and intriguing advancements of corpus studies in China, and, as such, provides much food for thought. Written in an accessible style, most chapters successfully synthesise the key literature, provide explicit descriptions of the relevant methodological tools and processes, offer in-depth analyses supported by sufficient corpus data and deliver
120
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
insightful reflections on both the present limitations and future directions of the field, which are all valuable for readers wishing to further contextualise their own exploration in greater detail. There are, perhaps, a few areas where the collection might have been stronger. Firstly, there is a bias towards the application of written corpora for language studies, whereas the potential affordances of spoken corpora for linguistic research remain underexplored. A spoken corpus can yield significant insights into distinctive features of different modes. Moreover, exploring the pedagogical potential of spoken corpora is vitally important in Chinese contexts, where spoken English has been largely neglected due to a long tradition of centrality of written language in EFL teaching syllabuses. There are also a number of minor errors which should have been picked up at the proof-reading stage, for example, spelling errors, misrepresentations (e.g., “Peking University”, the official name, instead of “Beijing University” on p. 4), and inconsistency in referencing style. Overall, however, the volume successfully provides an engaging, up-to-date and multifaceted overview of the ongoing corpus-informed analysis of language teaching and research in China, making it a valuable resource for language teachers and researchers who are keen on integrating corpus technology into their work. Acknowledgment This work was supported by China Scholarship Council (Grant No.201508330628). References Feng, Z. (2006). Evolution and present situation of corpus research in China. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 11(2), 173e207. Read, J., & Carroll, J. (2012). Annotating expressions of appraisal in English. Language Resources and Evaluation, 46(3), 421e447.
Wei Guan School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou, China E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2016.06.013
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
English language and its speakers’ cultures. These two chapters overall also highlight the concern of some scholars in viewing English and its expansion as a cultural threat for its learners because their cultural attitudes might be re-shaped as a result of exposure to values introduced through the new language. In the next chapter, Christine Manara elaborates on her own experiences as an English language teacher in presenting and discussing cultural values with learners from various educational backgrounds in Australia. Issues of diverse ideologies and the question of mono-lingualism are said to cause struggles and contradictions among teachers and learners of English. Additionally, the author believes that the type of learner and institution must be taken into consideration in understanding aspects of EIL teaching in different social settings. Reading an English teacher's lived experiences of conflicts and challenges is a fruitful way of attempting to create awareness on the part of practicing teachers about the complexity of EIL teaching and learning. Andrew Pollard focuses on linguistic imperialism and the so-called prestigious varieties of English in his chapter. To clarify this concept, he reports a study on the perceptions of a Korean learner of English in the selection of a variety of English to learn. The author argues that the educational aims behind the expansion of English need to be considered with regard to learners' attitudes about their own culture. The next two chapters, one by James D'Angelo and the other by Ram Ashish Giri and Joseph Ming Shyuh Foo, both discuss aspects of EIL teaching in Japan. It appears that unlike Korea which emphasizes learning different varieties of English, in Japan, educators employ native speakers and trust their methodologies and materials instead of local ones which are based on the local culture. The authors emphasize that localization and globalization need to be considered in EIL teaching policies and practices as integral entities. Finally, the Epilogue by Ahmar Mahboob provides a recap of the main concerns of the book and focuses on the centrality of understanding varieties of English in these concerns. While the individual papers are based on different approaches, the book as a whole provides readers with a shared emphasis on the importance of considering cultures in exploring issues related to EIL. In addition, contributors stress that there is no standard version of English, which is why grammar books do not seem accurate benchmarks of the ‘right’ English. However, as Mahboob states, the volume has mainly focused on the social functions of EIL while the linguistic aspects of English varieties must also be taken into account. Overall, in spite of questions that might be asked about the limited geographical and socio-cultural scope of the contributions, the over-detailed research reports in some chapters, and some structuring and presentation problems in the volume, the book does successfully highlight the place of cultural understandings in English language education worldwide. The main goal of the volume, that is, elaboration on the contextualities of EIL, is obviously achieved. While not free of shortcomings, this book is recommended to those who are concerned with research on English language learning and teaching as well as teachers of English to speakers of other languages. Farnoosh Rashed Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2016.06.014
Corpus linguistics in Chinese contexts, Bin Zou, Simon Smith, Michael Hoey (Eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK (2015). xxiii þ 203 pp.
Over the past few decades, the greater accessibility and improved capability of computers has accelerated the application of corpus linguistics, which has been extended to wide-ranging linguistic explorations by an increasing number of scholars around the world. Covering research presented at the international conference on Corpus Technologies and Applied Linguistics (CTAL-2012) held at Xi'an JiaotongeLiverpool University (XJTLU), China, Bin Zou, Simon Smith, and Michael Hoey's jointly-edited collection, Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts, provides a timely opportunity for practitioners in corpus linguistics worldwide to become familiar with the current exciting developments brought to language studies in China by the corpus approach. Along with the Introduction, the collection includes nine chapters on corpus-informed research: the first three pertaining to Chinese language analysis or cross-linguistic inquiries into Chinese and English and the next six showcasing English language investigation. Thematically, Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 9 can be distinguished from the remaining pedagogy-oriented chapters for their commitment to general linguistic issues. The introductory chapter (Li, Smith) outlines not only the important developments in Chinese language corpus construction from around the 2nd century A.D. to the present day, but also the evolution and achievements of studies in English corpora in China, with a focus on the compilation of Chinese learner English corpora, which have fuelled an explosive nationwide growth in research on English as a Foreign Language (EFL). However, Chinese language corpora constructed in Hong Kong and Taiwan are conspicuously absent from this conspectus (for a comprehensive review, see Feng, 2006).
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
119
In Chapter 1, Hoey and Shao use lexical priming theory, as developed by Michael Hoey, to reveal aspects of collocation, colligation and semantic association exhibited by two typologically unrelated languages, English and Chinese. The findings provide preliminary evidence that the priming apparatus seems applicable to Chinese data as well, suggesting that the theory's psycholinguistic claims are not language-specific. Admittedly, the investigation is confined to certain Chinese characters, and a greater breadth and depth of analysis is essential to justify the generalizability of the study's findings. The main contribution of this study lies in the theoretical value attached to corpus linguistics, indicating that it is not a theory-free approach. Chapter 2 (Xiao) presents another cross-linguistic observation of English and Chinese, with passive constructions and classifiers at the core of the investigation. Based on data extracted from two balanced, comparable written corpora and two spoken corpora of the language pair, the author compares the distribution patterns of two Chinese structures to their counterparts in English at different levels (e.g., overall frequencies, semantic/syntactic features) and obtains some interesting results. For example, counter to assertions that Chinese is a language of classifiers while English is not, the two languages share some striking qualitative similarities in their use of classifiers, though they differ quantitatively. In addition to the successful incorporation of quantitative and qualitative analyses, another merit of this chapter is its proposition for an integrated novel model of “contrastive corpus linguistics” for future research, offering significant potential for linking studies of corpus, translation and second language acquisition and expanding their collective research scope. For those with a particular appetite for corpus-assisted teaching or learning Chinese, Chapter 3 (Kilgarriff, Keng, and Smith) is a real feast. It probes the Sketch Engine's pedagogical exploitation, exemplifying how the core functions of this software (e.g., concordances, Word Sketches, thesaurus and Sketch Differences) enable meaningful searches into language use and thereby help learners acquire a better understanding of the meanings and collocations of Chinese words; for example, a one-page Word Sketch summary of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour might offer users an interesting and efficient way of learning that word. In Chapter 4, Liang posits that each section of any text in the same genre may have its own rhetorical idiosyncrasy of phraseologies, which has been insufficiently examined through corpus linguistics and genre analysis. To address this lacuna, he advances corpus software, the TextSmith Tools, and illustrates how it can be deployed to distinguish targeted lexicogrammatical features across different sections of sample academic articles in Applied Linguistics. As an exploratory study, it establishes the potential value of this powerful tool for genre analysis. Chapter 5 (He) presents a good example of implementing “corpus pedagogic processing”, which advocates the direct use of corpus data for pedagogical purposes. In this approach, university students learn to perform corpus searches, identifying phrasal verbs of pedagogical relevance and analysing their distributions and patterns; subsequently, they transfer the corpus data to EFL multimedia courseware used in Chinese middle schools. The results suggest that aligning corpus use with EFL activities is feasible and effective; furthermore, it enhances EFL teaching and learning at both second and tertiary levels, thus serving as an impetus for further pursuit. Both Chapters 6 (Peng) and 7 (Zou, Peng) highlight the value of corpus analysis in probing academic writing by EFL learners from XJTLU (a university in mainland China that features English-medium instruction) while focusing on different linguistic issues. Chapter 6 diagnoses the problems underlying students' use of countable/uncountable nouns. Comparison proves that the differences in the misuse of the targeted nouns between Chinese learners and native English speakers are statistically significant, and the author underlines the necessity of corpus research being applied to offer students more exposure to authentic materials. The author also counsels that dictionaries should be treated as descriptive rather than prescriptive, with practical examples demonstrating that the language use presented in dictionaries sometimes fails to adequately reflect native speakers' real use. Chapter 7 shifts the focus to conjunctions. On the basis of corpus data regarding students from XJTLU, nine other Chinese universities, and three British universities, the study reveals that, after one year of learning, XJTLU students bore more resemblance to British students than to their Chinese counterparts with respect to their use of conjunctions. Chapter 8 (Wang, Zheng and Cai) adopts an approach of straddling corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, and assesses the pedagogical potential of corpus techniques for EFL students' reading enhancement, whereby students in an experimental class participate in compiling a reading corpus, selecting and tagging texts and presenting textual analysis. Notably, students' feedback on the presented method's effectiveness is also considered for assessment. However, a more comprehensive elucidation of the results of the students' analysis, the pre-/post-tests and the questionnaire data might arguably have enriched this study's contribution to future empirical practice. Chapter 9 (Mei, Zhang and Yu) employs Appraisal Theory, with three parallel subsystems (attitude, engagement and graduation), to identify appraisal features in the reports about Chinese military affairs from the New York Times, embodying an interaction between quantitative and qualitative analyses. The convincing argument brings to light the reporters' less overt stance and evaluation. While the corpus is limited in scope owing to the time-consuming manual annotation process, some pioneering attempts (e.g., Read & Carroll, 2012) have been made to tackle this challenge: (semi-)automatic annotation tools that may prove useful in future inquiries. This volume, with most chapters (co-)authored by leading national and international corpus linguists, attempts to encapsulate the most salient and intriguing advancements of corpus studies in China, and, as such, provides much food for thought. Written in an accessible style, most chapters successfully synthesise the key literature, provide explicit descriptions of the relevant methodological tools and processes, offer in-depth analyses supported by sufficient corpus data and deliver
120
Book reviews / System 61 (2016) 110e120
insightful reflections on both the present limitations and future directions of the field, which are all valuable for readers wishing to further contextualise their own exploration in greater detail. There are, perhaps, a few areas where the collection might have been stronger. Firstly, there is a bias towards the application of written corpora for language studies, whereas the potential affordances of spoken corpora for linguistic research remain underexplored. A spoken corpus can yield significant insights into distinctive features of different modes. Moreover, exploring the pedagogical potential of spoken corpora is vitally important in Chinese contexts, where spoken English has been largely neglected due to a long tradition of centrality of written language in EFL teaching syllabuses. There are also a number of minor errors which should have been picked up at the proof-reading stage, for example, spelling errors, misrepresentations (e.g., “Peking University”, the official name, instead of “Beijing University” on p. 4), and inconsistency in referencing style. Overall, however, the volume successfully provides an engaging, up-to-date and multifaceted overview of the ongoing corpus-informed analysis of language teaching and research in China, making it a valuable resource for language teachers and researchers who are keen on integrating corpus technology into their work. Acknowledgment This work was supported by China Scholarship Council (Grant No.201508330628). References Feng, Z. (2006). Evolution and present situation of corpus research in China. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 11(2), 173e207. Read, J., & Carroll, J. (2012). Annotating expressions of appraisal in English. Language Resources and Evaluation, 46(3), 421e447.
Wei Guan School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou, China E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2016.06.013