Piotr Bański: DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

The FLEC/KEJO project (working name: “Foreign Language Exam Corpus”) is currently being developed at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. It analyses fragments of UW students’ papers taking unified foreign language certification exams. The corpus contains information on errors marked by examiners, which will enable cross-sectional studies of writing competences and methods, consistency and effectiveness of assessment. KEJO has the potential to become an umbrella project, a basis for subprojects focusing on specific languages, smaller fragments of research, extending research to earlier stages of language development or focusing on purely didactic applications of results. In the first phase, the project focuses on creating an architecture for a set of text data from short essays, created by students as part of foreign language certification exams submitted periodically at the University of Warsaw. This type of data enables research on the frequency and type of errors, and after minimal processing, also cross-sectional studies (transfer from Polish to a given foreign language) and pseudo-longitudinal studies, i.e. the degree of language acquisition at subsequent stages of learning ("pseudo" because the data of the writers are confidential, so the studies cannot be individual). In the next phase, an error identification layer (containing data created in the assessment process) will be added to the corpus, allowing for deeper research on foreign language acquisition, but also for research on the consistency and effectiveness of assessment, which should contribute, among other things, to improving guidelines for assessors. Dr Piotr Bański is a theoretical linguist by education. He is currently primarily involved in the architecture and use of large language corpora, language modeling for the purposes of corpus description and analysis, and the standardization of language resources within ISO/DIN. He participated, among others, in work on the IPI PAN corpus and the National Corpus of the Polish Language, and is an active member of the TEI community. His current place of work is IDS Mannheim, where he coordinates the KorAP project ("New Generation Corpus Analyzer"), which is coming to an end. He is also a guest lecturer at DELab UW, at the seminar "Digital Humanities. Projects, People, Theory". Place: BUW, ul. Dobra 56/66 Warsaw, room 315, 8.04.2015rd floor (take the elevator at the main entrance to the library, then to the end of the corridor and to the right) Time: Wednesday, April 16, 00, XNUMX:XNUMX p.m.