China Research Innovation Grant
We are honoured to be the joint recipients of a Research Innovation Award by British Council, China, under the 2021-2022 English Research and Materials Development Award.
Along with our partners, The Basic Education Curriculum and Teaching Material Research Center, National Institute of Education Sciences, China, we will be working towards the development of a Corpus-assisted Curriculum and associated materials.
Senior consultant James Thomas will be leading the project. James is Chair of the CorpusCALL SIG of EuroCALL, and a member of the Teaching and Language Corpora (TALC) conference committee. His main interests in language education revolve around vocabulary: how meaning emerges from words in co-text and context; how teachers can be trained to derive the properties of words from text; how students can be taught vocabulary learning strategies. Consequently, the main focus of his work is on the application of corpus resources to task-based teaching and learning.
Over the past twenty years James has published widely and given numerous conference presentations on the practical use of concordancers and corpora in language education, and it is this combination of analytical expertise and engagement with language pedagogy that he brings to the Research and Innovation Award, using corpus resources to investigate age-appropriate language for young Chinese learners.
We are very much looking forward to working with Associate Professor Yuanke Li, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Studies, South China Normal University, Guangzhou and Professor and Senior Research Fellow Yafu Gong of BECTMRC on this project and will be publishing the results in 2023.
