Bilingual Writers and Corpus Analysis

This innovative volume is one of the first to represent the usage of bilingual writers in both their languages, offering insight into language corpora as extremely valuable tools in contemporary applied linguistics research, and in turn, into how much of the world's population operate daily. This book discusses one of the first examples of a bilingual writer corpus, the Zayed Arabic-English Bilingual Undergraduate Corpus (ZAEBUC), which includes writing by hundreds of students in two languages, with additional information about the writers and the texts. The result is a rich resource for research in multilingual use and learning of language. The book takes the reader through the design and use of such a corpus and illustrates the potential of this type of corpus with detailed studies that show how assessment, vocabulary, and discourse work across two very different languages. This volume will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, and educators in bilingualism, plurilingualism, language education, corpus design, and natural language processing.

David M. Palfreyman is Professor of Language Studies and Assistant Dean for Research and Outreach at Zayed University, Dubai. He is a language teacher educator, a specialist in academic biliteracy, and founding editor of the journal Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Gulf Perspectives. Nizar Habash is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Computational Approaches to Modeling Language (CAMeL) Lab at New York University Abu Dhabi. His research includes extensive work on machine translation, morphological analysis, and computational modelling of Arabic and its dialects.

Table of contents List of Contributors - Why a bilingual writer corpus? Motivations and approaches (David M. Palfreyman) - ZAEBUC design and annotation: guidelines, processes, and insights (Nizar Habash, David M. Palfreyman) - The application of the CEFR to the assessment of L1 competence and plurilingual competence: methodology, possibilities and challenges (Salwa Mohamed) - Semantic domains across topics, genders and languages (Nouran Khallaf, Elvis de Souza, Mahmoud El-Haj, Paul Rayson) - Can adult lexical diversity be measured bilingually? A proof-of-concept study (Rima Elabdali, Shira Wein, Lourdes Ortega) - Lexical collocations in Arabic-English bilinguals' writing across two proficiency levels (Ali Al Sharef, Michael Bowles) - Personal metadiscourse and stance in Arabic and English essays: a comparative study (Basma Bouziri) - "Social media has invaded our homes, our lives and even our dining tables": metaphor in bilingual writers' discourse about social media (David M. Palfreyman, Omnia Amin) - Corpus-based SLA research: potential applications for ZAEBUC and beyond (Stefanie Wulff, Samantha Creel) Index