Multimodal Corpora and Concordancing in DDL

This chapter reviews research into multimodal corpora with reference to their application in data-driven-learning (DDL). In particular, it explores their construction, annotation, and concordancing in terms of their potential benefits for English language teaching (ELT) and in relation to advances in digital technologies. It notes that, besides overcoming various reservations about the limitations of concordances, multimodal approaches to DDL can undoubtedly provide learners with integrated visual/verbal cues that enhance language learning. However, at the very same time, despite their potential in encouraging language learners to see how linguistic patterns interact in discourse with the other semiotic resources, multimodal concordancing has so far had little impact on the use of DDL within ELT. The chapter suggests that the fundamental principle of DDL, the learner as detective/researcher, has itself changed as a result of today's digital affordances and that DDL is, thus, in the process of reinventing itself in the online world of multimodal interaction. This entails a wider vision of concordancing within multimodal DDL, concerned with online project-based construction, and annotation of corpora that requires the development of specific software tools responding to DDL's need to reconsider and revise the meaning of basic terms such as ‘multimodal, ‘concordance’, and ‘co-text’.