Crow presents workshops and research at AZTESOL 2019

On Saturday, November 2nd, 2019 the Crow team swooped into beautiful Flagstaff to attend the AZTESOL 2019 conference. Presenting on the topic “Bridging L2 Writing and Academic Vocabulary Through Corpus-based Activities”, Dr. Shelley Staples first introduced the Crow project, followed by a workshop led by Aleksey Novikov, Ali Yaylali, and Emily Palese. Although they weren’t able to attend, the workshop was also shaped by valuable input from Dr. Adriana Picoral and Hannah Gill. Dr. Nicole Schmidt and David Marsh were also on hand to assist participants.

Ali Yaylali (right) and Aleksey Novikov (center) lead the DDL workshop

During the workshop, attendees were introduced to Data-Driven Learning (DDL), an inductive approach to language learning in which corpus data is used to provide language learners with authentic examples of language use and grammatical forms from other learners. After being guided through an example interactive DDL activity using scrollable concordance lines developed in Crow lab, attendees were invited to make their own activities using data from the CROW corpus.

Example of the scrollable concordance lines for the Crow corpus used for the interactive DDL activity

After sharing their interactive DDL activity ideas, workshop participants were asked to share their valuable feedback with us by filling out a survey feedback form. Many thanks to everyone who attended!

Later in the day, Crow’s own Dr. Nicole Schmidt also presented her research on corpus-based pedagogy. In her presentation, “Lessons Learned: Reflecting on an Online Corpus-Based Pedagogy Workshop Series,” Nicole reflected on her experiences conducting a seven-week online corpus pedagogy workshop series for University of Arizona writing instructors. A number of these instructors chose to work with Crow to create activities for their first year writing classroom. The teachers especially appreciated that the Crow texts were representative of the texts that they assigned to their own students. Nicole has also recently successfully defended her doctoral dissertation. Congratulations!

Dr. Nicole Schmidt: Lessons Learned: Reflecting on an Online Corpus-Based Pedagogy Workshop

On the way back to their Tucson nest, the Crowbirds made a brief stop in Sedona to rest their wings and appreciate the beautiful and mystical landscape.

From left to right, Emily Palese, Dr. Shelley Staples, Aleksey Novikov, and David Marsh