Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Introduction
In recent years a lot of investigation has been devoted to how computers can facilitate language learning. One specific area on the computer frontier which still remains quite open to exploration is corpus linguistics. Having heard a declaration that corpora will revolutionize language teaching, I became very curious to find out for myself what corpus studies have to offer the English language teacher and how feasible such an implementation would be. This article will address those questions by examining what corpus linguistics is, how it can be applied to teaching English, and some of the issues involved. Resources are also included which will assist anyone who is interested in pursuing this line of study further.
Register Variation
One frequently overlooked aspect of language use which is difficult to keep track of without corpus analysis is register. Register consists of varieties of language which are used for different situations. Language can be divided into many registers, which range from the general to the highly specific, depending upon the degree of specificity that is sought. A general register could include fiction, academic prose, newspapers, or casual conversation, whereas a specific register would be sub-registers within academic prose, such as scientific texts, literary criticism, and linguistics studies, each with their own field specific characteristics. Corpus analysis reveals that language often behaves differently according to the register, each with some unique patterns and rules.
Syllabus Design
The syllabus organizes the teacher's decisions regarding the focus of a class with respect to the students needs. Frequency and register information could be quite helpful in course planning choices. By conducting an analysis of a corpus which is relevant to the purpose a particular class, the teacher can determine what language items are linked to the target register.
Materials Development
The development of materials often relies on a developer's intuitive sense of what students need to learn. With the help of a corpus, a materials developer could create exercises based on real examples which provide students with an opportunity to discover features of language use. In this scenario, the materials developer could conduct the analysis or simply use a published corpus study as a reference guide.
Classroom Activities
These can consist of hands on student-conducted language analyses in which the students use a concordancing program and a deliberately chosen corpus to make their own discoveries about language use. The teacher can guide a predetermined investigation which will lead to predictable results or can have the students do it on their own, leading to less predictable findings. This exemplifies data driven learning, which encourages learner autonomy by training students to draw their own conclusions about language use.
the potential different meanings and uses of common words useful phrases and typical collocations they might use themselves the structure and nature of both written and spoken discourse that certain language features are more typical of some kinds of text than others
Barlow (1992) suggests that a corpus and concordancer can be used to:
compare language use--student/native speaker, standard English/scientific English, written/spoken analyze the language in books, readers, and course books generate exercises and student activities analyze usage--when is it appropriate to use obtain rather than get? examine word order compare similar words--ask vs. request
Related to the issue of corpus selection is that of corpus bias, which can cause frustration for the teacher and student. This is because the data can be misleading; if one uses a very large general corpus, it may
obscure the register variation which reveals important contextual information about language use. The pitfall is that a corpus may tell us more about itself than about language use. Another obstacle to confront is the comprehensibility issue: if you use concordancing in a class, it can be quite difficult for the students (or even the teacher) to understand the data that it provides. Lastly, the issue of learning style differences--for some students, discovery learning is simply not the optimal approach. All of these points reinforce the caveat that careful consideration is required before a new technology is introduced in the classroom, especially one which has not been thoroughly explored and streamlined.
Interrogatives: Are there any Turkish students in your class? Negatives: No, there aren't any Turkish students in my class. Affirmatives: *Yes, there are any Turkish students in my class.
A corpus study by Mindt (1998) concluded that 50% of any usage takes place in affirmative statements, 40% in negative statements, and only 10% in interrogatives. My own concordance analysis bore his claim out, so I constructed the following exercise to represent the percentage distribution of the three structural uses of any, using ten representative examples. The purpose of this exercise is to get the students to discover three usage patterns and their relative frequency. These concordance lines can also be exploited for other purposes such as defining functions and common language chunks of any. It is assumed that an exercise like this would be part of a lesson context in which the students were studying quantifiers or something related.
Appendix 1
This is going to be a test like any other test, like, for example working with you.. If there are any questions about how we're going to and I didn't receive any materials for the November meeting and it probably won't make any difference. I mean, that's the next You can do it any way you want. Do you want to ask any questions? make any comments? I don't have any problem with that. I'm just saying if they make any changes, they would be minor changes. I think we ought to use any kind of calculator. I think that way I see it and it doesn't make any sense to me, but I can take that