Pixel International Conferences

Diving into digital education seems to be the reality in recent times. Universities and humanities departments in particular have willingly embraced technology-rich teaching methods for a long time now [1]. Nevertheless the general development is towards the implementation of basic digital literacy approaches rather than towards creating new discipline-adapted content that can improve the students’ digital-intensive research skills [2]. This paper illustrates how the discipline of corpus linguistics can create fruitful synergies between language related disciplines in the humanities: literatures studies, both in the native and foreign languages, translation studies, gender studies, media studies, cultural studies and linguistics. The aim of the study is to demonstrate the potential of exposing students in the humanities to digital-intensive research methods, such as corpus linguistics, to enhance learning motivation and improve disciplinary competence at the same time. The first part of the study is dedicated to the presentation and exemplification of the teaching and student research methods that have been implemented with first and second year undergraduate students at a Romanian university who conducted a three-month internship at the Centre for Corpus Related Digital Approaches to Humanities (CODHUS). The second part includes details on the teaching scenarios and outcomes of pedagogical interventions, based on the use of corpora, in two undergraduate courses. The paper concludes with a discussion on the impact of applied corpus linguistics methods for modern teaching in the humanities as well as their integration into the larger field of digital humanities.

Keywords: applied corpus linguistics, digital humanities, innovative teaching, ICT for language learning, Romanian university students.

References:

1. Harrison, T.M.; Stephen, T. “On-line disciplines: Computer-mediated scholarship in the humanities and social sciences”, Computers and the Humanities, vol. 26, 1992, pp. 181-193.
2. Chitez, M.; Rogobete, R.; Foitos, A. “Digital Humanities as an Incentive for Digitalisation Strategies in Eastern European HEIs: A Case Study of Romania”, Curaj, A., Deca, L.; Pricopie, R. (eds.), European Higher Education Area: Challenges for a New Decade, Springer Nature, 2020 (in press).