Dr Aleksander Wiater laureate of MINIATURA 7
Dr Aleksander Wiater’s research project ‘KorpUJF – Student Corpus of French’ has just received funding from the Miniatura 7 competition of the National Science Centre.
Aleksander Wiater holds a PhD in Humanities (UWr) and Language Studies (Sorbonne Nouvelle University Paris 3), is Assistant Professor and Head of the French Language Teaching Laboratory at the Institute of Romance Philology. He teaches French, Spanish and Polish as a foreign language.
He is the author (or co-author) of nearly 20 scientific publications (including monographs) and more than 30 conference presentations (more than 20 of them international) in, among others, Mexico, France, Czech Republic, Portugal, Ukraine, Germany, Albania. He collaborates with the Ministry of Education as an expert on French and Spanish language textbooks. His research interests include language teaching methodology, psycholinguistics, information and communication technologies in education, and the use of visual materials in teaching. The use of creativity and imagination in language teaching and learning and student corpora in oral expression research are also topics of his research inquiry.
Corpus research is becoming an increasingly common source of information about language and its users, contributing to a better understanding of the mechanisms of speech. Within computational linguistics, corpora of native speakers are being collected and developed, which has inspired glottodidacticians to investigate student corpora. While this research is mainly focused on English, there is little interest in other languages, especially in Polish. Corpus research, meanwhile, is an important source of data on language acquisition processes and the so-called interlanguage (the language between the source and target languages). Analysis of the linguistic means used by the learner provides insight into his/her communicative needs in different contexts and contributes to the understanding of language learning processes.
The knowledge and skills acquired during the research trips will be the starting point for the construction of a French-language corpus of oral expressions of Polish students. Collaboration with foreign research centres will also allow for the development of a common research direction and the creation of a student corpus of oral expressions in the future, which would integrate Polish-speaking students into the network of existing and emerging corpora of other non-native speakers of French.
