Workshops

Pre-conference workshops for Monday 4 September 2006

FULL-DAY workshop 80€
HALF-DAY workshop 40€

PLEASE NOTE: Where participants choose to do two HALF-DAY workshops, please ensure to choose one MORNING and AFTERNOON. ROOM* number to be posted here at a later date.

TITLE: MALTED Workshop (FULL DAY)
PRESENTER: Paul Bangs (Consultant)
TIME: 10:30-13:30h, 15.00-18.00h.
ROOM: I-3 (Facultad de Arquitectura Técnica, Faculty of Architecture)

MALTED (Multimedia Authoring for Language Tuition and Educational Development) was first developed within a large-scale project funded by the European Commission. Further development by the Spanish Ministry of Education and University College London Language Centre, has resulted in the availability of MALTED2.

The system can offer, via its use of templated construction, easy creation of a wide range of exercises: multiple choice; association/matching; crosswords; hangman; memory game; ordering; gap filling; transcription, spelling and translation; true/false; dialogues; recording; free writing.

But additionally, it has the power to combine these into coherent courseware. It also has flexibility of control over the graphical interface, and allows for the inclusion of media objects on to any screen, with conditional branching options.

The system uses Java to output as .xml. Malted and Java items can be downloaded from:
http://malted.cnice.mec.es/instalar/index.htm
Thanks to a GNU agreement, use of the system is open and free of charge to all.

In this workshop we will give a very brief overview of the system, but will concentrate on hands-on training to facilitate both production of exercise activities and their linking into courseware. A full English tutorial will also be available or can be seen in advance by going to www.malted.com .

Participants are welcome to bring with them any ideas and resources of their own (text, graphics, sound or video) but some sample content will be provided.

TITLE: Virtual EuroCALL (HALF DAY/MORNING/FREE)
PRESENTERS: Lesley Shield (The Open University, UK), Peppi Taalas (University of Jyvaskylä, Finland), Therese Örnberg Berglund (University of Umea; Sweden), David Barr (University of Ulster, UK)
TIME: 10:30-13:30h.
ROOM: I-2 (Facultad de Arquitectura Técnica, Faculty of Architecture)

This year's Eurocall conference is getting a virtual extension!

WHO IS IT FOR? Anyone who is not able to attend the conference in person has an opportunity to join in from diverse geographical locations. Delegates in Granada can also take part in the virtual conference if they wish to do so.

WHAT DOES IT OFFER? The workshop will:

- provide training in using the tools chosen to create the virtual conference space (Blogger, Yahoo!, Blog blob)
- discuss the use of these tools for creating meeting points and spaces for physically dispersed learning and social communities.

WHAT ARE THE OUTCOMES? The workshop will lead to the creation of:
- a team of EuroCALL bloggers who will report on interesting papers, social happenings and anything else of interest during the conference, keeping the virtual participants abreast with the happenings in Granada.
- a virtual meeting space in which distant and Granada-based delegates can meet and discuss issues around the conference.

Both delegates in Granada and virtual participants are welcome to join the workshop free of charge!

TITLE: Corpus linguistics and language training - introduction and applications (HALF DAY/MORNING)
PRESENTERS: Ylva BERGLUND (University of Oxford, UK) & Sabine Braun (University of Tübingen, Germany)
TIME: 10:30-13:30h.
ROOM: Computer room 08 (Facultad de Ciencias, Faculty of Science)

This workshop aims to demonstrate the wide range of possibilities for corpus applications in the context of language learning, teaching and translating. The emphasis of the workshop will be on sharing ideas and suggestions, and it is hoped that participants will leave the session with increased appreciation of what can be done with corpora in general as well as concrete ideas of how they themselves can use corpora in their field of activity. The session will contain both presentations and opportunities for hands-on practice.
The workshop will have three main components. We will demonstrate key technologies for exploiting corpora and introduce a range of (mainly freely available) corpora, corpus resources and tools. We will also discuss different types of corpora (large reference corpora, small DIY corpora, learner corpora, parallel corpora) and their pedagogical value. In addition we will give examples of corpus-based learning activities, 'research' questions and exploration tasks for different contexts of language training. There will be time for hands-on practice, where participants can explore corpora and questions which are relevant for their own work area, and the workshop will conclude with a general discussion. No previous experience of corpora or corpus use is required.

TITLE: Multimodal texts, genres, artefacts, corpora: how to analyse them, how to present them in language learning and language education contexts (HALF DAY/MORNING)
PRESENTERS: Anthony Baldry (University of Pavía, Italy) & Paul Thibault (University of Agder, Norway)
TIME: 10:30-13:30h.
ROOM: Computer room 06 (Facultad de Ciencias, Faculty of Science)

The focus in this workshop will be on (1) multimodal text analysis and transcription; (2) the choice of software and software techniques as a prerequisite to the development of online courses on multimodality; and (3) multimodal corpora and multimodal corpus linguistics in language teaching and research. The workshop will be organised in terms of demonstrations and theoretical discussion of (1), (2) and (3) by us. There will also be time for questions and discussion with participants. We will encourage a dialogical, discussion-oriented and practical (hands-on) approach at all stages.

TITLE: Corpus Annotation: Let's tag (HALF DAY/AFTERNOON)
PRESENTER: Keith Stuart (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain)
TIME: 15.00-18.00h.
ROOM: Computer room 06 (Facultad de Ciencias, Faculty of Science)

The workshop offers an introduction to corpus annotation. There are two main focuses to working with corpora: corpus-driven linguistics (analysing data from the 'raw' or pure corpus) and corpus-based linguistics (analysing enriched corpus data, enriched being the word used to describe an annotated - usually tagged or parsed - corpus). The workshop offers hand-on practice in tagging (explanation of how taggers work) and exploiting tagged corpora.

Firstly, we will briefly present reasons why corpus annotation is needed (giving examples of annotated corpora and how to access them) and their relevance for research and teaching. Secondly, we will describe the properties of corpus data, the levels of annotation, and standardisation efforts. Thirdly, we will present appropriate tools to enrichen corpora (so as to be able to carry out tasks such as tagging) and to exploit corpora (concordancers to work with collocation, statistical analyses, etc.). Finally, we present the potential of the web as a corpus and solutions to the problem of having to automatically detag web pages so as to be able to create plain text corpora. The workshop is aimed at people who are interested in designing and implementing corpora and have some prior experience.

TITLE: Understanding Recent Developments in On-line Student Interaction and Exchange (HALF DAY/AFTERNOON)
PRESENTER: Robert O'Dowd (University of León, Spain)
TIME: 15.00-18.00h.
ROOM: Computer room 08 (Facultad de Ciencias, Faculty of Science)

This workshop looks at the technicalities and pedagogy behind on-line interaction between language learners in different countries (i.e. telecollaboration). The participants will be introduced to the skills and knowledge which teachers and students need in order to ensure that their telecollaborative projects provide ample opportunities for both language practice and intercultural learning. Particular attention will be paid to introducing participants to recent developments in telecollaboration research and practice, including:
1) Newly-emerging Technologies: How are technologies such as Blogs, Virtual Learning Environments, voice- and video-conferencing contributing to on-line exchange? Practical examples will be examined.
2) Recent research: What does the recent dearth of publications on telecollaboration tell us about how on-line exchanges work?
3) Practical Applications: How can the findings in the literature related to focus on form and the development of intercultural competence be applied to on-line exchanges?