Day #166 — Silly little things called COLLOCATIONS S01E08 — Remote and Distance learning

In this episode, I thought I’d look at how the terms remote learning and distance learning occur in language use, as documented in computer-based storage platforms called corpora. The latter reveals how people use the language, and this use ultimately points to the co-occurence of specific words, aka COLLOCATIONS. A clear idea of the communicative context or Register and the frequency of a term by decade are the kind of additional info these tools can provide. It is the job of the researcher (specialized or lay) to make inferences and find patterns that tell us something about the arbitrary choices we make as users or the way we shape these choices.

Two terms that have been the buzz for all those involved in education in some manner are REMOTE LEARNING and DISTANCE LEARNING. I set out, then, to find answers for the following questions:

1. Which nouns or phrases COLLOCATE with the words REMOTE and DISTANCE respectively?

2. Have the terms occurred more often in the last five or ten years?

3. Seeing that the terms are “educational issues”, what register would they rank higher in?

To answer these questions, I decided to use two corpora — the News on the Web corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The first was chosen in the hope of finding up to date language use on the internet, as most of us had to resort to the Web for almost everything because of the Coronavirus pandemic. in a very tight nutshell, the two terms DO figure across registers, and the adjectives collocate with different nouns.

• Learning is the 12th most common collocate with Distance and the most frequent with REMOTE
• The term Distance Learning is most looked up in Ghana, while Remote Learning gets the most hits in the US
• Remote Learning occurred three times as much in 2020 than in the previous decade.
• Distance Learning occurred more evenly over the period of 2010–2019, with an average of 0.5 hits in a million compared to 4.48 in 2020 alone.
• Thus reflecting the recent changes in the way we access information and the way education is provided. Distance Learning was already a reality for some before the Covid-19 pandemic. Remote Learning became a forced reality for almost all of us, regardless of individual access to an internet connection or possession of some sort of digital device.

How do I know? Leave a message in the Comments so I can reach you.

Originally published at http://dablog-dablog.blogspot.com on June 15, 2020.