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

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.

The direct beneficiaries of this work will be students and teachers at our partner school. The proposed project has a potentially major impact on the teaching of English Language at A-level through the introduction of concepts, analytical techniques and software tools currently not found at pre-university level. Students will benefit from this by being given the confidence to apply the range of linguistic methods and undertake the independent research project required by their syllabus. There will be a longer term benefit, for the students and for the UK economy, if we can instil in them, as future university students and future researchers, an understanding of and interest in research. On a more practical note, the A-level students will be introduced to the kind of interactive virtual learning environment increasingly becoming a major part of university level courses, giving the students an advantage when they enter university.

Though our primary focus is on the engagement of A-level students with English linguistics, the students (and their teachers) will also be exposed to the cutting-edge web crawling and search mechanisms encapsulated in WebCorpLSE. Students will learn, both through an explanation of how WebCorpLSE works and through hands-on experiments, how to search more effectively, an important skill in an increasingly data-driven society.

The direct benefit to teachers will be in terms of Continuing Professional Development. Teachers will be informed of the latest developments in the field of linguistics, with particular reference to corpus analysis techniques and software. We envisage that the teachers will, in turn, use this knowledge in future lesson plans, including those for students pre-A-level. This is particularly important for teachers of English Language, given that the theoretical basis of the discipline is being emphasised more strongly, yet many teachers have not studied English Language or Linguistics as a significant element of their own first degree and receive little in-service training.

We shall ensure that students and teachers have the opportunity to benefit from our work by designing a series of master classes, tailored to the requirements of the A-level syllabus and presented in an engaging and relevant manner. These master classes will be supplemented by new learning materials and student-friendly graphical user interfaces to WebCorpLSE. All interactions with the students, face-to-face in the master classes and electronic through WebCorpLSE, will be monitored and evaluated according to the evaluation plan specified in the Case for Support to ensure that impact is maximised.

In the longer term, we envisage that our work will have a wider impact, with beneficiaries including teachers and students at other schools (both locally and nationally), policy-makers in the Education departments of UK local authorities, and curriculum designers at the Examination Boards. With this in mind, we plan to publicise our work online and host a 1 day workshop at the end of our KT Fellowship project for the benefit of these and other interested parties. Teachers will be encouraged to try WebCorpLSE in their classes, supported by the learning resources and with guidance from the RDUES team via a forum on the project website. In this way, our work will have a lasting impact beyond the period of the Fellowship award.