Ute Römer-Barron - Georgia State University

Ute Römer-Barron - Georgia State University
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Ute Römer-Barron
Georgia State University
Applied Linguistics & ESL
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Papers by Ute Römer-Barron
Introduction: Zooming in
‘Questions Involving National Peace and Harmony’ or ‘Injured Plaintiff Litigation’? The Original Meaning of ‘Cases’ in Article III of the Constitution
Georgia State University law review
, 2019
If a federal official is deliberately violating the Constitution, is it possible that no federal ...
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If a federal official is deliberately violating the Constitution, is it possible that no federal court has the power to halt that conduct? Federal judges have been answering “yes” for more than a century – dismissing certain kinds of lawsuits alleging unconstitutional conduct by ruling that the lawsuits were not “cases” as meant in the phrase “The judicial Power shall extend to all cases” in Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution. In 1911 the United States Supreme Court declared: “[T]he exercise of the judicial power is limited to ‘cases’ and ‘controversies.’ … By cases and controversies are intended the claims of litigants. … The term implies the existence of present or possible adverse parties, whose contentions are submitted to the court for adjudication.” The Supreme Court has subsequently further specified the meaning of “case” within the meaning of Article III to include the following “essential core”: a plaintiff who has suffered a concrete and particularized injury that...
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Fourth Circuit ruling reinforces that lack of standing cannot prevent judicial review, underlining potential access issues in constitutional cases.
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Research on advanced student writing across disciplines and levels
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
, 2012
This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resourc...
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This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resource that will enable researchers and teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to investigate the written discourse of highly advanced student writers whose written assignments have been awarded the grade ‘A’. The usefulness of two aspects of the design of the corpus — variation across discipline and across student level — is illustrated by two case studies, one on attribution and one on recurrent phraseological patterns. The first case study investigates how references to the work of others are realized and to what extent disciplinary variation exists in unpublished academic writing by students. The second study examines the use of phraseological items (n-grams and phrase-frames) by students at four different levels of undergraduate and graduate study. The paper closes with a discussion of the results of both case studies and describes future avenues for MICUSP-based research.
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Attribution frequency varies widely across disciplines in MICUSP, ranging from 53 occurrences in Industrial Engineering to 323 in History.
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Textbooks:A corpus-driven approach to modal auxiliaries and their didactics
How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching
, 2004
The paper presents an example of the indirect use of corpora in language pedagogy. It centres on ...
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The paper presents an example of the indirect use of corpora in language pedagogy. It centres on a comparative analysis of modal auxiliaries, their distribution, meanings, and contexts, in spoken British English corpus data and in selected texts from EFL textbooks. A focus lies on the differences observed between authentic English as used in natural communicative situations and the kind of synthetic English that pupils are often confronted with in the classroom. It is argued that, if taken seriously, corpus evidence can contribute to an improvement of teaching materials and that it is essential, especially in pedagogical contexts, to pay more attention to frequent phenomena and typical patterns of used language.
Pedagogical Applications of Corpora: Some Reflections on the Current Scope and a Wish List for Future Developments
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
, 2006
Despite the progress that has been made in the field of corpus linguistics and language teaching,...
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Despite the progress that has been made in the field of corpus linguistics and language teaching, the practice of ELT has so far been largely unaffected by the advances of corpus research, and corpora and concordances are hardly used in the German EFL classroom. This article aims to take stock of developments in this area and formulates tasks for the future of pedagogical corpus applications. After a brief overview of relevant corpus resources and a discussion of their availability, I will give an introduction to some direct and indirect approaches to using corpora in English language learning and teaching. The paper will then explore some current limitations of pedagogical corpus work and close with comments on a few desiderata in research and practice.
Applying Natural Language Processing Tools to a Student Academic Writing Corpus: How Large are Disciplinary Differences Across Science and Engineering Fields?
The Journal of Writing Analytics
, 2017
• Background: Researchers have been working towards better understanding differences in professio...
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• Background: Researchers have been working towards better understanding differences in professional disciplinary writing (e.g., Ewer & Latorre, 1969; Hu & Cao, 2015; Hyland, 2002; Hyland & Tse, 2007) for decades. Recently, research has taken important steps towards understanding disciplinary variation in student writing. Much of this research is corpus-based and focuses on lexico-grammatical features in student writing as captured in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). The present study extends this work by analyzing lexical and cohesion differences among disciplines in MICUSP. Critically, we analyze not only linguistic differences in macro-disciplines (science and engineering), but also in micro-disciplines within these macro-disciplines (biology, physics, industrial engineering, and mechanical engineering). • Literature Review: Hardy and Römer (2013) used a multidimensional analysis to investigate linguistic differences across four macro-disciplines represented in MICUSP. Durrant (2014, in press) analyzed vocabulary in texts produced by student writers in the BAWE corpus by discipline and level (year) and disciplinary differences in lexical bundles. Ward (2007) examined lexical differences within micro-disciplines of a single discipline. • Research Questions: The research questions that guide this study are as follows: 1. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between science and engineering student writing? 2. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between micro-disciplines within science and engineering student writing?
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DFA achieved 93.2% accuracy in classifying writing samples by discipline, outperforming chance significantly (50%).
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Applying corpus methods to written academic texts: Explorations of MICUSP
Journal of Writing Research
, 2010
the presen the creatio presents a use of its aims to de and provid Keywords disciplina. & Wulff, ...
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the presen the creatio presents a use of its aims to de and provid Keywords disciplina. & Wulff, S. (20 Journal of Writin nd copyright: Ea ngton St., Ann Ar under Creative license. lying c demic t ömer° & Ste ity of Michiga Based on explo nt paper provide on and examina a MICUSP-based attended and un emonstrate how de fruitful insigh s: MICUSP, st ry variation 010). Applying c ng Research, 2(2 arli | Ute Römer, rbor, MI 48104-Commons Attrib
Applied corpus linguistics for language acquisition, pedagogy, and beyond
Language Teaching
, 2021
This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas...
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This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas of applied linguistics, including second language acquisition and language assessment. It does this by showcasing a number of recent studies carried out by or with involvement of the author. These studies all focus on phraseological aspects of language and demonstrate the importance of studying its patterned nature. The studies also illustrate how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can allow us as applied linguists to contribute to solving problems in other disciplines (such as legal scholarship or music theory) and hope to thereby encourage more interdisciplinary research collaborations between corpus linguists and scholars from other fields.
Learner corpora and formulaic language in SLA
Cambridge University Press eBooks
, 2015
Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139810/1/LCR_offprint_pp357-378.pd
What can corpus linguistics tell us about second language acquisition?
The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics
, 2022
We the Citizens?": A Corpus Linguistic Inquiry into the Use of "People" and "Citizens" in the Founding Era
Georgia State University law review
, 2020
This Article addresses the background and historical context of the people as used in the Tenth A...
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This Article addresses the background and historical context of the people as used in the Tenth Amendment; prior research on the word people as used in the Tenth Amendment and the research question for this Article; the corpus methodology for analyzing this research question; and a comparative analysis of the words people and citizens. I. Background and Historical Context A. Legislative History of the Phrase "to the People" and the Tenth Amendment The Tenth Amendment's text provides: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." 4 The Amendment originates from the Articles of Confederation. Although the Articles of Confederation stated, in relevant part, that "[e]ach State retains its Sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States," 5 Congress intentionally rejected and omitted the word "expressly" as a qualification of granted powers in the Tenth Amendment. 6 Additionally, when originally proposed, the Tenth Amendment did not include the phrase "to the people" but concluded with "to the 4. U.S. CONST. amend. X. 5. ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION of 1781, art. II. 6. Upon the Tenth Amendment's passage, both Houses of Congress refused to insert the word "expressly" before "delegated.
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The study utilized a corpus of over 136 million words from the Founding Era to analyze linguistic patterns surrounding 'people' and 'citizens'.
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A corpus-based exploration of constructions in written academic English as a lingua franca
Studies in Corpus Linguistics
, 2020
The Power of Relevant Models: Using a Corpus of Student Writing to Introduce Discipinary Practices in a First Year Compsition Course
Across the Disciplines
, 2015
In attempts to find appropriate and authentic materials for students who are developing their aca...
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In attempts to find appropriate and authentic materials for students who are developing their academic writing skills, instructors often turn to works written by professional academics. However, genres such as published research articles and textbooks in specific disciplines may not be the most suitable models for what first year composition writers are expected to produce. This article suggests using a corpus of successful student writing across disciplines as a more appropriate and more realistic model for lower-level writing students. It describes a first year reading and writing course (taught at an American liberal arts college by the first author of this article) that incorporates the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) in helping students become ethnographers of disciplines and genres. As lower-level university students explore disciplines and narrow down their desired fields of study, MICUSP is used as a source of data from which students can (1) conduct linguistic research, (2) write subsequent research papers, and (3) become familiar with potential target academic discourse communities. Using a pedagogy of writing about writing, this process helped students raise their awareness of disciplinary practices. The article gives an overview of the course, focusing on class activities and including student evaluations of these activities. It demonstrates how a corpus like MICUSP can function as a useful and relevant tool in a discipline-specific, genre-based reading and writing course.
Effects of L2 usage and L1 transfer on Turkish learners’ production of English verb-argument constructions
Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics
, 2019
Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpu...
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Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpus (BNC), this article examines what Turkish learners of English know about a set of frequent verb-argument constructions (VACs, such as ‘V with n’ as illustrated by ‘I like to go with the flow’) and in what ways their VAC knowledge is influenced by native English usage and by transfer from their first language (L1), Turkish. An ICLE Turkish analysis gave us access to dominant verb-VAC associations in Turkish learners ́ English, and provided insights into the productivity and predictability of selected constructions. Comparisons with the BNC and other ICLE subsets (ICLE German and ICLE Spanish) allowed us to determine how strong the usage effect is on Turkish learners’ verb-VAC associations and whether Turkish learners differ in this respect from learners of other typologically different L1s. Potential effects of L1 transfer were explored with the help of a large reference corpus of Turki...
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A comparative study shows that L1 Turkish writers use both manner and path verbs significantly less than their German counterparts.
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Language assessment and the inseparability of lexis and grammar: Focus on the construct of speaking
Language Testing
, 2017
This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing pr...
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This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the notion of lexicogrammar in second language speaking assessment. The description of speech and some of its core features is based on the 1.8-million-word Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and on the 10-million-word spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC). Analyses of word frequency and keyword lists are followed by an automatic extraction of different types of phraseological items that are particularly common in speech and serve important communicative functions. These corpus explorations provide evidence for the strong interconnectedness of lexical items and grammatical structures in natural language. Based on the assumption that the existence of lexicogrammatical patterns is of relevance for constructs of speaking tests,...
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The paper advocates for corpus evidence use to investigate language patterns that blur the lines between lexis and grammar.
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“This seems somewhat counterintuitive, though…”
Studies in Corpus Linguistics
, 2005
As Thompson and Hunston note, "the expression of the writer's or speaker's opinion is an importan...
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As Thompson and Hunston note, "the expression of the writer's or speaker's opinion is an important feature of language" (2000: 2). This is particularly true for book reviews in which the expression of opinions is one of the central features. In this special text genre authors provide the research community with valuable information about new publications in their area of study and thus help people choose from the wide range of available books those books which they might most profit from. Reviewers do this by commenting on the book and by telling future readers what they think about it.
Corpus Research Applications in Second Language Teaching
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics
, 2011
Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also...
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Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also had an impact on second language learning and teaching. In the field of applied linguistics, more and more researchers and practitioners treasure what corpus linguistics has to offer to language pedagogy. Still, corpora and corpus tools have yet to be widely implemented in pedagogical contexts. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of pedagogical corpus applications and to review recent publications in the area of corpus linguistics and language teaching. It covers indirect corpus applications, such as in syllabus or materials design, as well as direct applications of corpora in the second language classroom. The article aims to illustrate how both general and specialized language corpora can be used in these applications and discusses directions for future research in applied corpus linguistics.
Introduction Patterns, meaningful units and specialized discourses
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Second language verb-argument constructions are sensitive to form, function, frequency, contingency, and prototypicality
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
, 2014
We used free association tasks to investigate second language (L2) verb-argument constructions (V...
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We used free association tasks to investigate second language (L2) verb-argument constructions (VACs) and the ways in which their access is sensitive to statistical patterns of usage (verb type-token frequency distribution, VAC-verb contingency, verb-VAC semantic prototypicality). 131 German, 131 Spanish, and 131 Czech advanced L2 learners of English generated the first word that came to mind to fill the V slot in 40 sparse VAC frames such as ‘he __ across the …’, ‘it __ of the …’, etc. For each VAC, we compared these results with corpus analyses of verb selection preferences in 100 million words of usage and with the semantic network structure of the verbs in these VACs. For all language groups, multiple regression analyses predicting the frequencies of verb types generated for each VAC show independent contributions of (i) verb frequency in the VAC, (ii) VAC-verb contingency, and (iii) verb prototypicality in terms of centrality within the VAC semantic network. L2 VAC processing i...
Using COBUILD grammar patterns for a large-scale analysis of verb-argument constructions: Exploring corpus data and speaker knowledge
This paper takes patterns identified in COBUILD Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs (Francis et al. 1996) a...
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This paper takes patterns identified in COBUILD Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs (Francis et al. 1996) as a starting point for the systematic, large-scale analysis of English verb-argument constructions (VACs), using both corpus/computational methods and psycholinguistic experiments. We work in an iterative cycle to define, search, review and refine patterns to retrieve VACs from a parsed version of the BNC and examine the distributions of the verb types and their token frequencies for each VAC. The findings allow us to make predictions regarding language users' knowledge of verbs in constructions. We then test these predictions in psycholinguistic experiments, in which native and non-native speakers of English think of the first word that comes to mind to fill the V slot in a particular VAC frame. We compare the results from the experiments and the corpus analysis in terms of verb selection preferences. This research demonstrates the productive synergy of corpus linguistic and psycholinguistic methods and findings.
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