A Japanese-English Parallel Corpus and CALL:

A Japanese-English Parallel Corpus and CALL: A Powerful Tool for Vocabulary Learning

95Chujo.pdf

Vocabulary building is an essential component to language learning, and new developments in technology provide new tools for learners. Using high-speed computers, it is now possible to use corpora in the classroom as a means to develop vocabulary and understand language structures in real language contexts. Although recognized by educators as a potentially useful tool, until now corpus application has been limited because the English concordance examples retrieved have been difficult for beginning level learners to understand (Tono, 2003; Umesaki, 2004). The recent development of English-Japanese parallel corpus programs have exciting potential for not only eliminating this barrier, but also in facilitating inductive corpus-based language learning, i.e., data-driven learning (DDL), in ways that have not been possible in the past.
To take advantage of the potential strengths in DDL, our team of associated researchers developed and combined a newspaper-based Japanese-English parallel corpus with a TOEIC-based CALL program to produce a set of corpus-based vocabulary learning activities for beginning level EFL learners. This paper will present a description of this CALL-Corpus program and will provide an overview of program development, and a case study including classroom implementation, student responses to the program, learning outcomes from the concordance-based activities in various learning contexts, and the optimum interface features between the corpus and the user.