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English Language in Use

ELiU members include both senior researchers and early career researchers in the English Department at INN University's Faculty of Education. The group actively collaborates with researchers from the Department of Scandinavian Language and Literature at INN, as well as national and international scholars from other institutions.

Established:: 2012
Affiliation:: Faculty of Education
Academic discipline:: Language and literature

stack of books and word blocks spelling "English"

Photo: Colourbox

The main focus of ELiU is on corpus linguistics and learner language. Corpus linguists investigate authentic oral and written language using data from corpora, i.e. collections of machine-readable and searchable texts. Accessing corpora of English learner language (both written and spoken) allows researchers to to chart the skills possessed by, and challenges faced by, learners of English at various stages of proficiency, and to identify factors that may influence their linguistic development.

What we research

EliU members research different thematic areas, with examples ranging from textual coherence to metaphor use. ELIU members also conduct contrastive linguistic research, comparing parallel texts in multilingual corpora with a view to identifying structural similarities and differences between several languages (including English and Norwegian). EliU members also concern themselves with the potential of corpora in the language classroom. In recent years, the group has broadened its scope to encompass additional aspects of English in use, using various sources of data.

More about the research group

Current projects:

Corpus of Student Teachers’ Writing (STEW): A research project aiming to build a database of student texts used for linguistic research and to improve teaching and learning. We are collecting texts from all students at HINN who wish to participate, both in English and Norwegian. One of the project’s aims is to construct a longitudinal corpus of students’ academic writing. The project involves researchers from the Department of English and the Department of Scandinavian language and literature at HINN. Contact person: Petter Hagen Karlsen)
Postgraduate Academic Writing in Norway (PAWN): Investigates academic writing at the master and doctoral levels. The data compilation of student texts (master theses and doctoral dissertations produced at colleges and universities in Norway) was carried out in 2018. These texts cover multiple disciplines. The overall goal of the project is to study the development og academic writing skills and to study disciplinary characteristics. Contact person: Sylvi Rørvik
Metaphor in Academic Talk: L2 metaphor production in Higher Education CLIL discussion Seminars (MetCLIL): Investigates the use of metaphor in academic discussion seminars in contexts where English is a medium of instruction (EMI), also known as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). This project, funded by the Spanish Research Council, is led by the University of Extremadura is Spain, and involves collaboration between researchers in the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Portugal, the UK and Norway (INN University). Contact person: Susan Nacey
Multilingual student translation corpus (MUST): Compilation of an international translation corpus, composed of translations are made by university students in different European countries, both to and from the students’ L1. The aim of the corpus is to facilitate research into second language acquisition and translation, for example students’ translation from mother tongue to foreign languages, or their translation solutions or challenges in translation. MUST is led by the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics at Université catholique de Louvain. The Norwegian component is managed the University of Agder, with contributions from the University of Oslo and INN University. Contact person: Siri Fürst Skogmo
Corpus of laterals project (COLATERAL): This project investigates /l/-sounds (laterals) in a cross-linguistic perspective, with a view to identifying the acoustic and articulatory differences between laterals in English, Norwegian and German. Samples of laterals have been and will be recorded from native speakers of all three languages and from two modes – speech and classical singing. Ultimately, the findings will be applied in the L2 phonetics teaching of English and German speech and singing. The project involves researchers at INN and the University of Oslo/The Norwegian Academy of Music. Contact person: Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden

ELiU doctoral projects:

Individual aspects of fluency: A contrastive study of utterance fluency variations in native and interlanguage speech: Investigates spoken English interlanguage, with an emphasis on the features that may contribute to fluency (e.g. pauses and fillers) and the potential for transfer of fluency-related features between a speaker’s languages. The material is drawn from the Norwegian component of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), as well as a comparable corpus of interviews in Norwegian, compiled for the purpose of this investigation.
- Contact person: Hege Larsson Aas
A Corpus-Based Network Approach to Second Language Acquisition and Teaching: This project aims at making Diasystematic CxG usable for the language classroom. For this purpose, I am looking at two distinct constructions in learner language. The first part of the project investigates interrogative constructions in German learners of English diasystematic construct-i-cons. The data for this research is a learner corpus that consists of 100 texts by German students who were 11-14 at the time of data collection. The second part focuses on relative clauses in learner language. The Germanic languages Norwegian, German, and English all have a relative clause construction. Moreover, Norwegian appears to have an additional construction that the other two do not, namely relative clauses that modify pronouns. Based on this observation and previous research on relative clause constructions in the TRAWL corpus, this study investigates the production of relative clauses in Norwegian L2 learners’ English. In addition, relative clause constructions in their L1 Norwegian production and their L3 German production will be used for the investigation. These two case studies both focus on horizontal or lateral relations in the construct-i-con (cf. Diessel 2019, 2023) and their role in the L2 acquisition of two distinct constructions (i.e. interrogative constructions and relative clauses).
- Contact person: Linda Gerisch
Analysis of metaphors about studying during the coronavirus pandemic in written learner English of Finnish students: Investigates metaphorical productions in learner English of students with Finnish background. The data includes a corpus of essays written by university students L2 speakers of English on the topic of studying during the coronavirus pandemic. Different approaches to metaphor elicitation were used to explore students’ conceptualizations and experiences of the pandemic.
- Contact person: Renata Turunen

Completed doctoral projects:

Corpora in the EFL classroom: Toward a discovery learning approach: Investigates the use of corpora as a potential learning tool in the English as a foreign language [EFL] classroom. The research focuses on direct learner interaction with corpora and aims to examine teacher and learner beliefs, experiences, and perspectives with different corpus resources. The project primarily relies on interview and observation data. (Petter Hagen Karlsen)
The use of corpora by English language teachers: Investigates the use of corpora in English language teaching in Norway, focussing on the extent of corpus use (and non-use) among teachers, what corpora teachers use and what for, and what teachers new to corpora find useful or challenging. (Barry Kavanagh)

Projects ELiU members have been involved in:

The Norwegian component of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI; completed but not yet released): Interviews in English of Norwegian students of English. This corpus will be released in the second edition of LINDSEI
Norwegian-English Student Translations (NEST; completed): A bilingual corpus containing translated texts written by Norwegian students of English and relevant metadata. The searchable corpus (tagged for part of speech) NEST is freely available.
Tracking Written Learner Language (TraWL): A longitudinal corpus of authentic pupil texts and relevant metadata, compiled by CorLing members in collaboration with researchers at the University of Oslo, University of Agder and the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics in Belgium. The texts are written in English by Norwegian schoolchildren from 5th grade through the upper secondary level, over a period of at least three years. The TraWL project seeks to research the development of written competence in schoolchildren from various angles. In 2019, project ownership was transferred from INN University to the University of Oslo, and the webpages can be found here: TraWL

Conferences and events

Together with the research group Language and Society (HINN), ELiU hosts SpINN, an annual conference within the Faculty of Teacher Education at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. The main aim of this conference is to present ongoing reserarch on language and linguistics within the faculty.

For more information (in Norwegian), see: SpINN

In 2021, the research group hosted the first Learner Corpus Graduate Conference under the aegis of the Learner Corpus Association. The conference was virtual and free, and graduate students and academics from North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia gathered for two days to listen to presentations, chat with experts in the field, go to quiz night and attend plenaries by Sylviane Granger and Luciana Forti. The complete book of abstracts can be found here.

Guest lectures 2020-2021:

Signe Oksefjell Ebeling, Universitetet i Oslo: Compiling corpora of student writing (3.11.2021)
Elena Semino, Lancaster University: Corpus approaches to health communication (26.5.2021)
Fiona Farr, University of Limerick: More than words: phraseology in the reflective practice discourses of ELTE (28.4.2021)
Frazer Heritage, University of Birmingham: Videogame data from a corpus perspective (24.3.2021)
Elen LeFoll, Universität Osnabrück: Attempting to bridge the corpus linguistics research-practice gap with the creation of an Open Educational Resource by and for (student) teachers (24.2.2021)
Tove Larsson, University of Arizona: On linguistic interpretability in corpus linguistics (8.12.2020)
Dan McIntyre & Brian Walker, University of Huddersfield: Stylomitry (10.11.2020)