MICASE-Corpus Training for Students and Visiting Scholars

Corpus Training for Students and Visiting Scholars

Members of the Michigan Corpus Linguistics team provide corpus training (including help with research projects and introductions to corpus-analytic software) for students at the University of Michigan and visiting scholars at the English Language Institute (ELI).

Corpus analysis and software tutorials for ELI/UM international students

Students learning to write academic English can often struggle with choosing the right word to use in a paper or technical report, or when they know the word they want to use they might not know the appropriate modifier or preposition to use with it. Learner dictionaries and grammar books may not always provide sufficient or relevant guidance in these situations. Language corpora and corpus analysis tools can help fill this gap.

We provide introductory tutorials and hands-on workshops in a number of the Academic English classes taught in the ELI to introduce students to the basics of corpus analysis. Most often students are introduced to some of the online corpus tools that allow them to search for examples of words and phrases in different text types and extract frequent (and infrequent) collocates of words. Knowing how to use these tools provides them with a means of correcting and evaluating their own academic writing.

Information for prospective ELI visiting scholars

The ELI awards short-term research scholarships to students and researchers who would like to use the ELI’s resources to carry out a project related to research carried out by ELI scholars. Please check the following websites for details about ELI visiting scholar requests and ELI Morley scholarships.

Recent ELI visiting scholars

• Laura Muresan, Bucharest University of Economics, Romania
• Min Wang, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China
• Yinjie Fang, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), China
• Holger Limberg, University of Oldenburg, Germany
• Akiko Okamura, Takasaki City University of Economics, Japan
• Maria Rosario Artiga-León, University of Zaragoza, Spain
• Maria Mercedes Querol-Julián, University Jaume I, Castellón, Spain
• Diane Schmitt, University of Nottingham, UK
• Begoña Bellés-Fortuño, University Jaume I, Castellón, Spain
• Rafael Alejo, University of Extremadura, Spain