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Yukio Tono

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I am a Professor in Corpus Linguistics and the Director of the World Language Center at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan. My research interests include learner corpus research, corpus applications for language teaching, corpora and the CEFR.

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University of California, Merced

University of Amsterdam

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Yildiz Technical University

Hacettepe University

Virginia Commonwealth University

Viacheslav Kuleshov

Stockholm University

Hacettepe University

King AbdulAziz University (KAU) Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

İzmir Demokrasi Üniversitesi / İzmir Democracy University

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Papers by Yukio Tono

Exploring the Cognitive Strategies of Dictionary Use : A Study of EFL Learners' Idiom Look-Up Operations

Using a dedicated corpus to identify features of professional English usage: What do “we” do in science journal articles?

This paper addresses the problem of inadequate educational materials for the effective training o... more This paper addresses the problem of inadequate educational materials for the effective training of nonnative speakers in the professional English of the scientific community. The paper claims that one cause of this inadequacy is lack of proper linguistic research based on suitable linguistic research tools. The development of a major international corpus of professional English in the sciences and other fields is described as a significant resource for solving this problem, illustrated with a specific research project examining the use of we in general English from the Corpus of Professional English. Results reveal the value of well-designed dedicated corpora for addressing the specific English instructional needs of non-native speakers of English in the professions.

Effect of Menus on EFL Learners' Look-up Processes

Lexikos, Jan 11, 2013

This paper emphasizes the importance of empirical research on dictionary users and, in particular... more This paper emphasizes the importance of empirical research on dictionary users and, in particular, investigates the effect of the so-called "menu" (a list of definitions at the beginning of a polysemous article) on EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' dictionary look-up processes. The menu has been increasingly popular in English leamer's dictionaries in Japan, but no empirical evidence has ever shown that it is really effective for reference acts. Two groups of subjects with different levels of reference skills were observed looking up given information in two different types of mini-dictionaries, one with and the other withnut the menu. The results showed that the menu was not so effective for skilled users, but that it helped the less skilled users find the appropriate information.

A Computer Learner Corpus-based Analysis of the Acquisition of Irregular Verbs : Optimizing the Learning List and Monitoring the Learning Process

Computational Lexicography : A Lexicographer`s workbench for new - word selection & identification : Web - server - based automatic identification of neologism candidates and the client editing system

Practicum on Learner Corpus Research(JACET 40^ ANNUAL CONVENTION)

JACET全国大会要綱, Sep 10, 2001

What is missing in learner corpus design?

Studies in corpus linguistics, Dec 2, 2016

Compiling a balanced corpus of modern Japanese: design issues and implications for Japanese lexicography

Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX International Congress, 2004

An extensive, balanced corpus of the Japanese language comparable in size and structure to the Br... more An extensive, balanced corpus of the Japanese language comparable in size and structure to the British National Corpus (BNC) has so far not been compiled. Consequently, the practice ofcompiling general-purpose monolingual dictionaries on the basis ofcorpora has not yet been fully established in our country. Shogakukan, one ofthe leading publishers in Japan, has launched a project to compile a balanced Japanese-language corpus in order to produce new monolingual dictionaries of contemporary Japanese. Shogakukan has a long history and has been producing over 2,000 titles a year, ranging from general fiction, non-fiction books, magazines, and comics to dictionaries. These in-house materials are ofsufficient variety and quantity to give us a headstart in producing a large-scale, balanced corpus ofthe Japanese language, the Shogakukan Contemporary Japanese CorpiK, with the collaboration of academic research institutions and other publishing companies, • this paper we will focus on the following two points: (1) how to define the concept ofbalance in terms of genre or subcorpora proportions by using breakdown statistics for publications in the domestic market in Japan; (2) how to estimate the optimal corpus size (i.e., the minimal amount of corpus data that can still adequately represent all the different linguistic behaviors ofthe candidate dictionary entries.).

EFL Learners' Proficiency and Roles of Feedback : Towards the Most Appropriate Feedback for EFL Writing

ARELE: Annual Review of English Language Education in Japan, 1995

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different types of feedback (direct cor... more The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different types of feedback (direct correctien, stamping, underiining) on the development of EFI. Iearners' writing ability. The subjects (2nd and 3rd-year junior high and 2nd-year senior high students) participated in the four-month program in which they wrote six in-cLass essays with different feedback. The results show that there was a significant relationship between feedback types and learners' grades, Especially direct teacher correction, xvhich was found to be no rnore effective than the other feedback methods in the case of junior-high subjects, sliowed a significant difference in effect for the group of senier high students.

Criterial feature extraction using parallel learner corpora and machine learning

John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, 2013

This study reports on a new approach in semi-automatic error annotation and criterial feature ext... more This study reports on a new approach in semi-automatic error annotation and criterial feature extraction from learner corpora. Parallel learner corpora, a set of original learner writings and their proofread counterparts, were processed using edit distance to automatically identify surface taxonomy errors, which were then statistically analysed to produce language features which serve as criterial for a particular language proficiency level. Two case studies will report on different statistical and machine learning techniques; a clustering technique called variability-based neighbour clustering and ensemble learning called random forest . The results of the two case studies show that using edit distance over parallel learner corpora is a promising direction for annotating a large quantity of learner data with minimum manual annotation work, and both statistical techniques were found to be effective in identifying criterial features from learner corpora. Some theoretical and methodological issues are discussed for further research.

Application Of Eye-Tracking In Efl Learners' Dictionary Look-Up Process Research

International Journal of Lexicography, Feb 9, 2011

The present study aims to apply eye-tracking technologies to analyse the process of dictionary lo... more The present study aims to apply eye-tracking technologies to analyse the process of dictionary look-up by learners of English as a foreign language. An experiment was conducted to examine detailed processes of look-up in the microstructure. Several variables (the availability of supporting devices such as signposts or menus, different types of grammar codes, positions of target definitions) were carefully controlled to see how look-up behaviour would change in both monolingual and bilingual dictionary interfaces. The findings show that look-up processes within a microstructure are very complex, showing interactive effects among positions of target information within the microstructure, functions of supporting devices, and users' proficiency levels. Pedagogical and methodological implications will be discussed.

Multiple comparisons of IL, L1 and TL corpora: The case of L2 acquisition of verb subcategorization patterns by Japanese learners of English

John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, 2004

... This proved to be an efficient means of study-ing verb SFs. The Comlex Lexicon (Macleod et al... more

Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book

Series editors' preface xv Preface xvii Acknowledgements xix SECTION A: INTRODUCTION Unit A1 Corp... more Series editors' preface xv Preface xvii Acknowledgements xix SECTION A: INTRODUCTION Unit A1 Corpus linguistics: the basics A1.1 Introduction A1.2 Corpus linguistics: past and present A1.3 What is a corpus? A1.4 Why use computers to study language? A1.5 The corpus-based approach vs. the intuition-based approach A1.6 Corpus linguistics: a methodology or a theory? A1.7 Corpus-based vs. corpus-driven approaches Summary Looking ahead 1 2 Unit A2 Representativeness, balance and sampling A2.1 Introduction A2.2 What does representativeness mean in corpus linguistics? A2.3 The representativeness of general and specialized corpora A2.4 Balance A2.5 Sampling Summary Looking ahead Unit A3 Corpus markup A3.1 Introduction A3.2 The rationale for corpus markup A3.3 Corpus markup schemes A3.4 Character encoding Summary Looking ahead Unit A4 Corpus annotation A4.1 Introduction A4.2 Corpus annotation = added value A4.3 How is corpus annotation achieved? A4.4 Types of corpus annotation A4.5 Embedded vs. standalone annotation C oatsrif s Summary 44 Looking ahead 45 UnitA5 Multilingual corpora 46 A5.1 Introduction 46 A5.2 Multilingual corpora: terminological issues 47 A5.3

Lexicography in Asia: its future and challenges

Lexicography, Jun 24, 2014

The average number of participants at these conferences was about 200, coming from 20-30 countrie... more The average number of participants at these conferences was about 200, coming from 20-30 countries in Asia and elsewhere. Emulating the organization of EURALEX, we produced conference proceedings for each conference, which morphed into some important publications such as McArthur and Kernerman (1998), special issues in Studies in Lexicography (2001) from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, and Ooi et al. (2009). In the near future, the proceedings' papers will be made available online at the ASIALEX website (http://www.asialex.org).

International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage: Project overview and a case study on the acquisition of new verb co-occurrence patterns

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2012

Japanese Lexicography

Elsevier eBooks, 2006

Coming Full Circle —From CEFR to CEFR-J and back

CEFR journal, May 20, 2019

The CEFR-J project was launched in Japan in 2008. The CEFR-J gives a set of Can Do descriptors fo... more The CEFR-J project was launched in Japan in 2008. The CEFR-J gives a set of Can Do descriptors for 10 CEFR sublevels (Pre-A1 to B2.2) and related Reference Level Description (RLD) work, whilst including developed profiling for vocabulary, grammar, and textual features were developed. In this article, the English resources created for the CEFR-J are applied in preparing teaching resources for other major European languages as well as Asian languages. To achieve this, a series of teaching/learning resources including the CEFR-J Wordlist and Phrase List initially developed for English were translated into 27 other languages using neural machine translation. These translated word and phrase lists were then manually corrected by a team of language experts. The automatic conversion of English to other languages was evaluated against human judgments as well as frequency analysis referencing web corpora. Three types of e-learning resources were created, taking into consideration the wordlists and the phrase lists for teaching those languages to undergraduate students: (1) a flash-card app for learning vocabulary, which allows for classification by both thematic topic and CEFR level, (2) an online syntax writing tool for the study of grammar and vocabulary, and (3) an online spoken and written production corpus collection tool.

Research on Dictionary Use in the Context of Foreign Language Learning

De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 31, 2001

The effects of using corpora on revision tasks in L2 writing with coded error feedback

ReCALL, Feb 24, 2014

This study reports on the results of classroom research investigating the effects of corpus use i... more This study reports on the results of classroom research investigating the effects of corpus use in the process of revising compositions in English as a foreign language. Our primary aim was to investigate the relationship between the information extracted from corpus data and how that information actually helped in revising different types of errors in the essays. In 'data-driven learning', previous research has often failed to provide rigorous criteria for choosing the words or phrases suitable for correction with corpus data. By investigating the above relationship, this study aims to clarify what should be corrected by looking at corpus data. 93 undergraduate students from two universities in Tokyo wrote a short essay in 20 minutes without a dictionary, and the instructors gave coded error feedback for two lexical or grammatical errors. They deliberately selected one error which should be appropriate for checking against corpus data and one that was more likely to be corrected without using any reference resource. Three weeks later, a short hands-on instruction of the corpus query tool was given, followed by revision activities in which the participants were instructed to revise their first drafts, with or without the tool depending on the codes given to each error. 188 errors were automatically classified into three different categories (omission, addition and misformation) using natural language processing techniques. All words and phrases tagged for errors were further annotated for part-ofspeech (POS) information. The results show that there was a significant difference in the accuracy rate among the three error types when the students consulted the corpus: omission and addition errors were easily identified and corrected, whereas misformation errors were low in correction accuracy. This reveals that certain errors are more suitable for checking against corpus data than others.

Introducing the Shogakukan Corpus Query System and the Shogakukan Language Toolbox

ABSTRACT

Exploring the Cognitive Strategies of Dictionary Use : A Study of EFL Learners' Idiom Look-Up Operations

Using a dedicated corpus to identify features of professional English usage: What do “we” do in science journal articles?

This paper addresses the problem of inadequate educational materials for the effective training o... more This paper addresses the problem of inadequate educational materials for the effective training of nonnative speakers in the professional English of the scientific community. The paper claims that one cause of this inadequacy is lack of proper linguistic research based on suitable linguistic research tools. The development of a major international corpus of professional English in the sciences and other fields is described as a significant resource for solving this problem, illustrated with a specific research project examining the use of we in general English from the Corpus of Professional English. Results reveal the value of well-designed dedicated corpora for addressing the specific English instructional needs of non-native speakers of English in the professions.

Effect of Menus on EFL Learners' Look-up Processes

Lexikos, Jan 11, 2013

This paper emphasizes the importance of empirical research on dictionary users and, in particular... more This paper emphasizes the importance of empirical research on dictionary users and, in particular, investigates the effect of the so-called "menu" (a list of definitions at the beginning of a polysemous article) on EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' dictionary look-up processes. The menu has been increasingly popular in English leamer's dictionaries in Japan, but no empirical evidence has ever shown that it is really effective for reference acts. Two groups of subjects with different levels of reference skills were observed looking up given information in two different types of mini-dictionaries, one with and the other withnut the menu. The results showed that the menu was not so effective for skilled users, but that it helped the less skilled users find the appropriate information.

A Computer Learner Corpus-based Analysis of the Acquisition of Irregular Verbs : Optimizing the Learning List and Monitoring the Learning Process

Computational Lexicography : A Lexicographer`s workbench for new - word selection & identification : Web - server - based automatic identification of neologism candidates and the client editing system

Practicum on Learner Corpus Research(JACET 40^ ANNUAL CONVENTION)

JACET全国大会要綱, Sep 10, 2001

What is missing in learner corpus design?

Studies in corpus linguistics, Dec 2, 2016

Compiling a balanced corpus of modern Japanese: design issues and implications for Japanese lexicography

Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX International Congress, 2004

An extensive, balanced corpus of the Japanese language comparable in size and structure to the Br... more An extensive, balanced corpus of the Japanese language comparable in size and structure to the British National Corpus (BNC) has so far not been compiled. Consequently, the practice ofcompiling general-purpose monolingual dictionaries on the basis ofcorpora has not yet been fully established in our country. Shogakukan, one ofthe leading publishers in Japan, has launched a project to compile a balanced Japanese-language corpus in order to produce new monolingual dictionaries of contemporary Japanese. Shogakukan has a long history and has been producing over 2,000 titles a year, ranging from general fiction, non-fiction books, magazines, and comics to dictionaries. These in-house materials are ofsufficient variety and quantity to give us a headstart in producing a large-scale, balanced corpus ofthe Japanese language, the Shogakukan Contemporary Japanese CorpiK, with the collaboration of academic research institutions and other publishing companies, • this paper we will focus on the following two points: (1) how to define the concept ofbalance in terms of genre or subcorpora proportions by using breakdown statistics for publications in the domestic market in Japan; (2) how to estimate the optimal corpus size (i.e., the minimal amount of corpus data that can still adequately represent all the different linguistic behaviors ofthe candidate dictionary entries.).

EFL Learners' Proficiency and Roles of Feedback : Towards the Most Appropriate Feedback for EFL Writing

ARELE: Annual Review of English Language Education in Japan, 1995

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different types of feedback (direct cor... more The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different types of feedback (direct correctien, stamping, underiining) on the development of EFI. Iearners' writing ability. The subjects (2nd and 3rd-year junior high and 2nd-year senior high students) participated in the four-month program in which they wrote six in-cLass essays with different feedback. The results show that there was a significant relationship between feedback types and learners' grades, Especially direct teacher correction, xvhich was found to be no rnore effective than the other feedback methods in the case of junior-high subjects, sliowed a significant difference in effect for the group of senier high students.

Criterial feature extraction using parallel learner corpora and machine learning

John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, 2013

This study reports on a new approach in semi-automatic error annotation and criterial feature ext... more This study reports on a new approach in semi-automatic error annotation and criterial feature extraction from learner corpora. Parallel learner corpora, a set of original learner writings and their proofread counterparts, were processed using edit distance to automatically identify surface taxonomy errors, which were then statistically analysed to produce language features which serve as criterial for a particular language proficiency level. Two case studies will report on different statistical and machine learning techniques; a clustering technique called variability-based neighbour clustering and ensemble learning called random forest . The results of the two case studies show that using edit distance over parallel learner corpora is a promising direction for annotating a large quantity of learner data with minimum manual annotation work, and both statistical techniques were found to be effective in identifying criterial features from learner corpora. Some theoretical and methodological issues are discussed for further research.

Application Of Eye-Tracking In Efl Learners' Dictionary Look-Up Process Research

International Journal of Lexicography, Feb 9, 2011

The present study aims to apply eye-tracking technologies to analyse the process of dictionary lo... more The present study aims to apply eye-tracking technologies to analyse the process of dictionary look-up by learners of English as a foreign language. An experiment was conducted to examine detailed processes of look-up in the microstructure. Several variables (the availability of supporting devices such as signposts or menus, different types of grammar codes, positions of target definitions) were carefully controlled to see how look-up behaviour would change in both monolingual and bilingual dictionary interfaces. The findings show that look-up processes within a microstructure are very complex, showing interactive effects among positions of target information within the microstructure, functions of supporting devices, and users' proficiency levels. Pedagogical and methodological implications will be discussed.

Multiple comparisons of IL, L1 and TL corpora: The case of L2 acquisition of verb subcategorization patterns by Japanese learners of English

John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, 2004

... This proved to be an efficient means of study-ing verb SFs. The Comlex Lexicon (Macleod et al... more

Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book

Series editors' preface xv Preface xvii Acknowledgements xix SECTION A: INTRODUCTION Unit A1 Corp... more Series editors' preface xv Preface xvii Acknowledgements xix SECTION A: INTRODUCTION Unit A1 Corpus linguistics: the basics A1.1 Introduction A1.2 Corpus linguistics: past and present A1.3 What is a corpus? A1.4 Why use computers to study language? A1.5 The corpus-based approach vs. the intuition-based approach A1.6 Corpus linguistics: a methodology or a theory? A1.7 Corpus-based vs. corpus-driven approaches Summary Looking ahead 1 2 Unit A2 Representativeness, balance and sampling A2.1 Introduction A2.2 What does representativeness mean in corpus linguistics? A2.3 The representativeness of general and specialized corpora A2.4 Balance A2.5 Sampling Summary Looking ahead Unit A3 Corpus markup A3.1 Introduction A3.2 The rationale for corpus markup A3.3 Corpus markup schemes A3.4 Character encoding Summary Looking ahead Unit A4 Corpus annotation A4.1 Introduction A4.2 Corpus annotation = added value A4.3 How is corpus annotation achieved? A4.4 Types of corpus annotation A4.5 Embedded vs. standalone annotation C oatsrif s Summary 44 Looking ahead 45 UnitA5 Multilingual corpora 46 A5.1 Introduction 46 A5.2 Multilingual corpora: terminological issues 47 A5.3

Lexicography in Asia: its future and challenges

Lexicography, Jun 24, 2014

The average number of participants at these conferences was about 200, coming from 20-30 countrie... more The average number of participants at these conferences was about 200, coming from 20-30 countries in Asia and elsewhere. Emulating the organization of EURALEX, we produced conference proceedings for each conference, which morphed into some important publications such as McArthur and Kernerman (1998), special issues in Studies in Lexicography (2001) from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, and Ooi et al. (2009). In the near future, the proceedings' papers will be made available online at the ASIALEX website (http://www.asialex.org).

International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage: Project overview and a case study on the acquisition of new verb co-occurrence patterns

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2012

Japanese Lexicography

Elsevier eBooks, 2006

Coming Full Circle —From CEFR to CEFR-J and back

CEFR journal, May 20, 2019

The CEFR-J project was launched in Japan in 2008. The CEFR-J gives a set of Can Do descriptors fo... more The CEFR-J project was launched in Japan in 2008. The CEFR-J gives a set of Can Do descriptors for 10 CEFR sublevels (Pre-A1 to B2.2) and related Reference Level Description (RLD) work, whilst including developed profiling for vocabulary, grammar, and textual features were developed. In this article, the English resources created for the CEFR-J are applied in preparing teaching resources for other major European languages as well as Asian languages. To achieve this, a series of teaching/learning resources including the CEFR-J Wordlist and Phrase List initially developed for English were translated into 27 other languages using neural machine translation. These translated word and phrase lists were then manually corrected by a team of language experts. The automatic conversion of English to other languages was evaluated against human judgments as well as frequency analysis referencing web corpora. Three types of e-learning resources were created, taking into consideration the wordlists and the phrase lists for teaching those languages to undergraduate students: (1) a flash-card app for learning vocabulary, which allows for classification by both thematic topic and CEFR level, (2) an online syntax writing tool for the study of grammar and vocabulary, and (3) an online spoken and written production corpus collection tool.

Research on Dictionary Use in the Context of Foreign Language Learning

De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 31, 2001

The effects of using corpora on revision tasks in L2 writing with coded error feedback

ReCALL, Feb 24, 2014

This study reports on the results of classroom research investigating the effects of corpus use i... more This study reports on the results of classroom research investigating the effects of corpus use in the process of revising compositions in English as a foreign language. Our primary aim was to investigate the relationship between the information extracted from corpus data and how that information actually helped in revising different types of errors in the essays. In 'data-driven learning', previous research has often failed to provide rigorous criteria for choosing the words or phrases suitable for correction with corpus data. By investigating the above relationship, this study aims to clarify what should be corrected by looking at corpus data. 93 undergraduate students from two universities in Tokyo wrote a short essay in 20 minutes without a dictionary, and the instructors gave coded error feedback for two lexical or grammatical errors. They deliberately selected one error which should be appropriate for checking against corpus data and one that was more likely to be corrected without using any reference resource. Three weeks later, a short hands-on instruction of the corpus query tool was given, followed by revision activities in which the participants were instructed to revise their first drafts, with or without the tool depending on the codes given to each error. 188 errors were automatically classified into three different categories (omission, addition and misformation) using natural language processing techniques. All words and phrases tagged for errors were further annotated for part-ofspeech (POS) information. The results show that there was a significant difference in the accuracy rate among the three error types when the students consulted the corpus: omission and addition errors were easily identified and corrected, whereas misformation errors were low in correction accuracy. This reveals that certain errors are more suitable for checking against corpus data than others.

Introducing the Shogakukan Corpus Query System and the Shogakukan Language Toolbox

ABSTRACT

CEFR Journal – Research and Practice (Volume 1)

by Morten Hunke and Yukio Tono

CEFR Journal – Research and Practice (Volume 1), 2019

The Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) CEFR & Language Portfolio SIG (CEFR & LP SIG) ... more The Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) CEFR & Language Portfolio SIG (CEFR & LP SIG) started this online open-access peer review journal on all things CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for languages) and ELP (European Language Portfolio) in May 2019. A fascinating new bottom-up journal for all professionals and students in the field. Take a closer look.