#203 - Ute Römer-Barron (Georgia State University)

This week’s interview is with Ute Roemer-Barron, a professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Georgia State University. Their discussion covered corpus linguistic investigations, how they conducted a large-scale research project, and the study's implications. I was interested in the interview from the outset because of the project's practicality and the clear explanation of how the findings apply. As someone not involved in this field of research but closely connected to the repercussions of findings from a study like this, I recognized the importance to Professor Roemer-Barron of explaining her work.

For example, Professor Roemer-Barron explains the way one of the investigation tools her research was connected to, the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP), was designed:

[09:11] Really, it's the way we designed. It was not for corpus researchers, but much more simple and accessible for teachers, students, people who are just interested in in academic writing across different disciplines, and maybe are looking for a good sample reports in biology or something, right? So, so that you could pull out some text samples that work for you and for your students. So we didn't want the, you know, everybody's familiar with the traditional keyword and context format of a concordance. We thought that would probably put people off, because it does look a little odd if you've never seen it before you have those.

Listening to this, I remembered other interviews that have been conducted on the podcast: Todd Beucken’s interview with Paul Reine and his tools for online teaching (#38) and Chris Cooper’s interview with Atsuhi Mizumoto (#171) about his online-accessible suite of analysis tools were both examples of where the interviewee described what the listener could use for themselves if they were interested in investigating by themselves further.

The concept of making findings more accessible to the layperson and perhaps making the findings of constructive grammar studies less opaque and more widely applicable was also dealt with throughout the interview, but this passage towards the end of the interview was a good summation: 

[43:39] I think some of them are still not as transparent as they could be, especially if we're interested in and this is always where I'm I'm coming from. Like trying to help learners. And first, better understand how, how constructions, or the learners construct … a mental construct, a con develops. But also, how can we make life easier for learners knowing what they might struggle with or where maybe they they don't develop the same lexical associations as quickly? Yeah? So, yeah, I think transparency.

It’s a great interview for anyone interested in research activities as it includes the rationale, the methodology, the findings and the discussion, including the process of publishing and applying the findings in the real world.