Corpus-based tasks for learning Chinese: a data-driven approach

摘要

Over the last couple of decades, there have been many studies on the utility of data-driven learning(DDL) approaches to the acquisition of English and other Indo-European languages. Very littleresearch has touched on DDL for Chinese, or indeed any corpus-based approaches to learning it. Thisis surprising, given the otherwise large choice of IT applications, including flashcards, onlinedictionaries, and stroke order practice software: certainly, it seems, people do wish to learn Chinesewith computers.Certain features of the Chinese language make it especially suited to a data-driven approach. In DDL,learners typically explore collocational and colligational patterns among words, but would not expectto be able to look at the internal structure of words using a corpus tool. The logographic Chinesewriting system, however, allows the learner to investigate the ways that characters/morphemes patternto form words.We offered several corpus-based tasks to intermediate-level Mandarin learners, alongsidetraditional-communicative conversation classes. We describe these tasks, as well as some of thecorpora and corpus interfaces used in our approach