The advancement of technologies and the recently forced lockdown by Covid-19 are bringing changes to the organisation of the learning process by accelerating the introduction of e-learning to create a learner-centred technology-based approach to English studies, thus stepping towards digital humanities. These trends initiated the institutional project Mobile and Desktop Software Integration in Bachelor and Master Study Programmes. The present study, using a questionnaire, elicits university students’ attitudes to the mobile applications and speech analysis software-based seminar activities in Moodle e-course in accordance with the blended learning model selected for the studies of theoretical grammar and phonetics. It is a cross-sectional, focused, and exploratory case study, comprising a description of factors, contributing to the problem of blended learning model selection. The yielded data demonstrate that students do not possess extensive prior experience with the use of software and mobile applications to study English grammar and phonetics. After completing seminar tasks, they favourably account for the integrated blended learning materials and consider that those facilitate their learning process.
Research of linguistic features requires part of speech (POS) tagging of texts. The existing POS taggers have been predominantly trained on native speakers’ texts to enhance their accuracy. The researchers exploring POS tagging of ELL (English language learners) texts distinguish tagger’s and learners’ errors and suggest annotation enhancement schemes. However, the frequency and types of CLAWS7 (Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word Tagging System) tagging errors in ELL texts of different communicative purposes have not been sufficiently explored to suggest annotation enhancement solutions in each particular learner corpus building case. This study investigates CLAWS7 tagged texts composed by non-native English philology BA students (English Studies Department, University of Latvia) to uncover the overall precision of the tags having the greatest impact on the error rate and provide an insight into errors to reveal the texts requiring annotation enhancement solutions. Material for the analysis has been selected from the corpus of student-composed texts. The results show that tagging precision varies across the text groups. The texts edited by the students show greater tagging precision, and therefore would not require specific annotation enhancement procedures before their tagging. Tagging precision is lower in such interactional texts as chat messages that could be addressed by the application of an annotation enhancement scheme.
The slang name for Canadian dollar loonie is a Canadianism used not only in spoken (Boberg, 2010: 121), but also in written texts such as Canadian news articles. While loonie is obviously taken for granted by Canadians, its occurrence in English texts published beyond Canada has hardly been in the focus of corpus-based studies. The goal of this study is to find out in what Canadian English written texts loonie occurs and whether it is encountered in the other varieties of English by researching the corpora adapted for web access at Brigham Young University (BYU), the Strathy Corpus of Canadian English (SCCE), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). The first two corpora were searched to reveal the genres of the written texts loonie occurs and GloWbE – to see loonie used in the other varieties of English. The obtained results revealed that loonie occurs in such written texts as newspaper and magazine articles of SCCE and COCA predominantly in the contexts connected with money issues. Search of GloWbE showed the use of loonie in American and British mass media texts, which reveals that this Canadian slang name goes beyond Canadian texts and thus, as Davies (2005: 45) has stated ‘[...] few of us are cocooned from [...] vocabulary of the major international varieties of English’. These findings therefore call for more detailed research of the collocations containing loonie in various text types of different varieties of English.
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