This article uses part of the Internet Grammar that was developed at Chemnitz University to illus... more This article uses part of the Internet Grammar that was developed at Chemnitz University to illustrate a new way of presenting real language data and language rules in the same ‘grammar’ with an inductive component, called the discovery section, and a deductive component, called the explanations section. I have focused on prepositions here in order to demonstrate how grammar can be presented and to discuss how learners use both inductive and deductive learning strategies in their work to come to terms with these extremely polysemous forms of English. The new computer-based learning environment allows us not only to set up a new form of ‘grammar’ but also, for the first time, to look empirically at how such a learning resource is exploited by individual learners to develop their own internal grammar from an external grammar (an electronic grammar supported with corpus examples).
Lingue Culture Mediazioni - Languages Cultures Mediation (LCM Journal)
Even though the use of digital tools as an alternative to or in support of more traditional metho... more Even though the use of digital tools as an alternative to or in support of more traditional methods is no longer considered a novelty in the context of language learning, as a consequence of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, what used to be an opportunity was transformed into a pressing and inevitable necessity that led all the actors involved in the training and evaluation process to radically change their way of teaching and assessing. Within a matter of days, educators around the world scrambled to shift their practice from in-person to remote teaching. The need to maintain social distancing prompted the transition to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). Even though globally the emergency posed by Covid-19 popularized ERT as a temporary intervention to complete a higher education academic year, ERT has undoubtedly proved to be a feasible alternative for “students unconventionally dispersed, either locally or abroad, when only limited contact to educational facilities and instruc...
The article examines register variation in East African English by submitting the East African co... more The article examines register variation in East African English by submitting the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to a complete multidimensional analysis (Biber 1988). A six-factor model was extracted using 67 linguistic features (Biber 1988). The results show that the extent of register variation is not less in ICE-East Africa than in Biber (1988). However, East African English displays unique stylistic features across registers. The overall effect is that East African English leans more towards the formal side (especially Dimensions 3, 5 and 6). There is a strong emphasis on the involvement of the addressee, more formal features for the encoding of information, and delineation of reference by textual rather than contextual means, even when the information is not very abstract. The paper establishes a baseline of the extent of register variation in East African English, and identifies certain typical features across all registers.
This contribution summarises the current status and future plans for the Corpus of East African E... more This contribution summarises the current status and future plans for the Corpus of East African English (ICE-EA), which is part of the International Corpus of English (cf. Greenbaum 1996, Schmied 1996 and forthcoming). It concentrates on methodological problems that are related to the exploitation tools on several discovery levels, starting from the individual corpus text through the entire ICE-EA up to the World-Wide Web as a corpus (Schmied 2005). It shows that the investigations using ICE corpora for comparative theoretical and practical analyses of second-language varieties of English has hardly started, but also that interesting new research opportunities are available.
This article uses part of the Internet Grammar that was developed at Chemnitz University to illus... more This article uses part of the Internet Grammar that was developed at Chemnitz University to illustrate a new way of presenting real language data and language rules in the same ‘grammar’ with an inductive component, called the discovery section, and a deductive component, called the explanations section. I have focused on prepositions here in order to demonstrate how grammar can be presented and to discuss how learners use both inductive and deductive learning strategies in their work to come to terms with these extremely polysemous forms of English. The new computer-based learning environment allows us not only to set up a new form of ‘grammar’ but also, for the first time, to look empirically at how such a learning resource is exploited by individual learners to develop their own internal grammar from an external grammar (an electronic grammar supported with corpus examples).
Lingue Culture Mediazioni - Languages Cultures Mediation (LCM Journal)
Even though the use of digital tools as an alternative to or in support of more traditional metho... more Even though the use of digital tools as an alternative to or in support of more traditional methods is no longer considered a novelty in the context of language learning, as a consequence of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, what used to be an opportunity was transformed into a pressing and inevitable necessity that led all the actors involved in the training and evaluation process to radically change their way of teaching and assessing. Within a matter of days, educators around the world scrambled to shift their practice from in-person to remote teaching. The need to maintain social distancing prompted the transition to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). Even though globally the emergency posed by Covid-19 popularized ERT as a temporary intervention to complete a higher education academic year, ERT has undoubtedly proved to be a feasible alternative for “students unconventionally dispersed, either locally or abroad, when only limited contact to educational facilities and instruc...
The article examines register variation in East African English by submitting the East African co... more The article examines register variation in East African English by submitting the East African component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) to a complete multidimensional analysis (Biber 1988). A six-factor model was extracted using 67 linguistic features (Biber 1988). The results show that the extent of register variation is not less in ICE-East Africa than in Biber (1988). However, East African English displays unique stylistic features across registers. The overall effect is that East African English leans more towards the formal side (especially Dimensions 3, 5 and 6). There is a strong emphasis on the involvement of the addressee, more formal features for the encoding of information, and delineation of reference by textual rather than contextual means, even when the information is not very abstract. The paper establishes a baseline of the extent of register variation in East African English, and identifies certain typical features across all registers.
This contribution summarises the current status and future plans for the Corpus of East African E... more This contribution summarises the current status and future plans for the Corpus of East African English (ICE-EA), which is part of the International Corpus of English (cf. Greenbaum 1996, Schmied 1996 and forthcoming). It concentrates on methodological problems that are related to the exploitation tools on several discovery levels, starting from the individual corpus text through the entire ICE-EA up to the World-Wide Web as a corpus (Schmied 2005). It shows that the investigations using ICE corpora for comparative theoretical and practical analyses of second-language varieties of English has hardly started, but also that interesting new research opportunities are available.
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Papers by Josef Schmied