Article published in:
Multiple Affordances of Language Corpora for Data-driven Learning
Edited by Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska and Alex Boulton
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 69] 2015
► pp. 155–176

Textual cohesion patterns for developing reading skills

A corpus-based multilingual learning environment

| Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds
This chapter proposes a systematic methodology for developing top-down processing strategies for L2/L3 reading, and the creation of contrastive linguistic resources that support them. The work specifically focuses on acquisition of reading strategies to support text comprehension using a multilingual electronic thesaurus of textual connectors for Russian, Ukrainian and English, which were systematically derived from large corpora and classified according to the author’s semantic classification scheme. This thesaurus is then used for automatically annotating connectors in texts in the corpus to support reading strategies and to find texts of similar type or genre for teaching reading. This methodology was developed primarily for students of Russian learning to read Ukrainian, but it can be applied to the development of reading and writing skills in any L2.
Keywords: connectors, reading skills, reading strategies, text structure, textual cohesion
Published online: 13 May 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.69.08bab
References

References

Baroni, M. & Bernardini, S.
2004 BootCaT: Bootstrapping corpora and terms from the web. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’04), M.T. Lino, M.F. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa & R. Silva (eds), 1313–1316. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). http://​www​.comp​.nus​.edu​/~rpnlpir​/proceedings​/lrec​-2004​/pdf​/509​.pdf (7 May 2014).Google Scholar
Biber, D.
1995 Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-linguistic Comparison. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E.
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Carrell, P.
1984 The effects of rhetorical organization on ESL readers. TESOL Quarterly 18: 441–469. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1985 Facilitating ESL reading by teaching text structure. TESOL Quarterly 19: 727–752. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Crewe, W.
1990 The illogic of logical connectives. ELT Journal 44(4): 316–325. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Croft, W. & Cruse, D.A.
2004 Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
de Beaugrande, R.D. & Dressler, W.U.
1981 Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Evert, S. & Hardie, A.
2011 Twenty-first century Corpus Workbench: Updating a query architecture for the new millennium. In Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics Conference 2011 . http://​www​.birmingham​.ac​.uk​/documents​/college​-artslaw​/corpus​/conference​-archives​/2011​/Paper​-153​.pdf (7 May 2014).
Flowerdew, J. & Mahlberg, M.
(eds) 2009 Lexical Cohesion and Corpus Linguistics [Benjamins Current Topics 17]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Flowerdew, L.
2012 Corpora and Language Education. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Goldman, S.R. & Rakestraw, J.
2000 Structural aspects of constructing learning from text. In Handbook of Reading Research, Vol. 3, M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P.D. Pearson & R. Barr (eds), 311–335. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Grabe, W.
2009 Reading in a Second Language. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Granger, S. & Petch-Tyson, S.
1996 Connector usage in the English essay writing of native and non-native EFL speakers of English. World Englishes 15: 19–29. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grellet, F.
1981 Developing Reading Skills: A Practical Guide To Reading Comprehension Exercises. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Halliday, M.A.K. & Hasan, R.
1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Halliday, M.A.K. & Matthiessen, C.
2004 An Introduction To Functional Grammar, 3rd edn. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Hudson, T.
2007 Teaching Second Language Reading. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Jalkanen, J. & Vaarala, H.
2013 Digital texts for learning Finnish: Shared resources and emerging practices. Language Learning & Technology 17(1): 107–124.Google Scholar
Leech, G.
2000 Grammars of spoken English: New outcomes of corpus-oriented research. Language Learning 50(4): 675–724. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lutjeharms, M.
2002 Lesestrategien und Interkomprehension in Sprachfamilien. In EuroCom: Mehrsprachiges Europa durch Interkomprehension in Sprachfamilien, G. Kischel (ed.), 119–154. Aachen: Shaker.Google Scholar
McCann, W.J., Klein, H.G. & Stegmann, T.D.
2003 EuroComRom – The Seven Sieves: How to Read All the Romance Languages Straight Away. Aachen: Shaker.Google Scholar
McEnery, T. & Xiao, R.
2007 Parallel and comparable corpora: What are they up to? In Incorporating Corpora: Translation and the Linguist, G.M. Anderman & M. Rogers (eds), 18–31. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. http://​eprints​.lancs​.ac​.uk​/59 (7 May 2014).Google Scholar
Meyer, B. & Poon, L.
2001 Effects of structure strategy training and signaling on recall of texts. Journal of Educational Psychology 93(1): 141–159. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Paramita, M.L., Clough, P., Aker, A. & Gaizauskas, R.
2012 Correlation between similarity measures for inter-language linked Wikipedia articles. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’12), N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, M. Uğur Doğan, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk & S. Piperidis (eds), 790–797. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). http://​www​.lrec​-conf​.org​/proceedings​/lrec2012​/index​.html (7 May 2014).Google Scholar
Perfetti, C.
1985 Reading Ability. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
2007 Reading ability: Lexical quality to comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading 11(4): 357–383. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Priyatkina, A.
2002 Tekstovye skrepy i skrepy-frazy (o rasshyrenii kategorii sluzhebnykh edinits russkogo iazyka) [Textual ‘ties’ and ‘tie-phrases’ (on the extension of the category of function words in Russian)]. In Predlozhenie. Tekst. Rechevoe Funktsyonirovanie Iazykovykh Edinits. Mezhvuzovskii Sbornik Nauchnykh Trudov, 208–214. Elets, Russia: Bunin Elets State University.Google Scholar
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J.
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rashmi, P., Dinesh, N., Lee, A., Miltsakaki, E., Robaldo, L., Joshi, A. & Webber, B.
2008 The Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’08), N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis & D. Tapias (eds), 2961–2968. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). http://​www​.lrec​-conf​.org​/proceedings​/lrec2008 (7 May 2014).Google Scholar
Schiffrin, D.
1987 Discourse Markers. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schleppegrell, M.
1989 Functions of ‘because’ in spoken discourse. PhD dissertation, Georgetown University.
Scott, M.
2008 Developing WordSmith. International Journal of English Studies 8(1): 95–106.Google Scholar
Sharoff, S.
2006 A uniform interface to large-scale linguistic resources. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, A. Gangemi, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk & D. Tapias (eds), 538–542. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). http://​www​.lrec​-conf​.org​/proceedings​/lrec2006 (7 May 2014).Google Scholar
Skadina, I., Aker, A., Giouli, V., Tufis, D., Gaizauskas, R., Mierina, M. & Mastropavlos, N.
2010 A collection of comparable corpora for under-resourced languages. In Human Language Technologies: The Baltic Perspective, I. Skadina & A. Vasiljevs (eds), 161–168. Amsterdam: IOS Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, M.
2007 Querying multimodal annotation: A concordancer for GeM. In LAW’07 Proceedings of the Linguistic Annotation Workshop , 57–60. Stroudsburg PA: Association for Computational Linguistics. http://​dl​.acm​.org​/citation​.cfm​?id​=1642059​.1642069​&coll​=DL​&dl​=GUIDE​&CFID​=333207822​&CFTOKEN​=35450273 (7 May 2014). Crossref
Thompson, G. & Zhou, J.
2000 Evaluation and organization in text: The structuring role of evaluative disjuncts. In Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Creation of Discourse, S. Hunston & G. Thompson (eds), 121–141. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Westhoff, G.
1997 Fertigkeit Lesen. Berlin: Langenscheidt.Google Scholar