SWANSEA UNIVERSITY
LANGUAGE RESEARCH CENTRE SEMINAR SERIES

Wednesday, 2nd April, 13:00-14:00 UK time (BST/ GMT+1)

Zoom Link:
https://swanseauniversity.zoom.us/j/96688743280?pwd=AWZa1tmmRtaIeWLmcHGS9GpzzwJM8b.1

Creating and evaluating corpus-informed word lists for adolescent, beginner-to-low-intermediate learners of French, German, and Spanish


Professor Emma Marsden (University of York) & Dr Natalie Finlayson

We describe recent changes to the lexical content of GCSE examinations in French, German, and Spanish as foreign languages in secondary schools in England, where optional topic-based guide lists have been replaced by obligatory frequency-informed lists. Drawing on Finlayson et al. (2024) and Marsden et al. (2023), we outline the steps, taken in collaboration with teachers and members of an awarding organization, to create corpus-informed lists based on frequency, word-topic relatedness, and teacher judgments of usefulness, relevance, and difficulty. The new lists are much shorter than the previous guide lists yet provide substantially greater coverage of four, adolescent-relevant corpora. We discuss reasons for these findings,and highlight potential uses and concerns related to wordlists.

Natalie held roles as a Learning Resource Developer and Research Associate at the University of York from 2019-2024. Her work focused on creating and evaluating word lists and learning resources to support curriculum and pedagogy and the new GCSE subject content for French, German, and Spanish, gathering evidence to support recommendations to the subject review panel, and managing the development of the MultilingProfiler lexical profiling tool. She has also served as a Research Assistant in Education at the University of Leeds and a Research Fellow in corpus linguistics at the University of Birmingham. Natalie is currently Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.

Having taught French, Spanish, and English as foreign languages in schools in England and Chile at the start of her career, Emma Marsden has been professor of second language education since 2018 in the Department of Education at the University of York. With colleagues and students, Emma has written about 90 publications on language learning and teaching and open scholarship, with an ever-growing interest in lexical studies! She directs the open research repositories iris-database.org and oasis-database.org, and from 2015 to 2022, was Associate Editor and then Journal Editor ofLanguage Learning. Between 2018-2023 she directed the National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy (now https://ldpedagogy.york.ac.uk/).

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
Language Acquisition

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
French (fra)
German (deu)
Spanish (spa)