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. Therefore, using DDL in vocabulary teaching fits logically. Their close relationship provides great opportunities for learning more about vocabulary and how to apply DDL in the language classroom. Both will be explored together in the following chapters through specific aspects of vocabulary learning. These include: frequency knowledge and example sentences, part of speech knowledge, morphological knowledge, synonym knowledge, collocational knowledge, and register knowledge. Before these ideas are presented, a brief introduction to the corpus used in this book will be given and how it facilitates both DDL and vocabulary learning.
13 balanced equally between its five registers of spoken, news, academic, fiction and magazine (Davies, 2009). Therefore, users need not fear that the examples they find are only how people write in newspapers, or only how they speak. This gives students a more realistic interpretation of how and where words are used. Third, COCA is based only on American English, ensuring a consistent and constant reference point for language. This ensures that for students in the United States, vocabulary is appropriate to the learning context. Though not all language in the corpus may be proper English, all of the sources in COCA are published or broadcasted by American corporations and maintain some standard of acceptability (Davies, 2009). Fourth, the interface of COCA allows for easy access to non-linguists without them requiring to know specific part of speech tags or codes to perform searches. COCA also includes help guides and tours to learn how to use its features, whether for vocabulary or for grammatical searches. In addition, COCA is free and publicly accessible on the internet at www.americancorpus.org. Users only need to register an email address. Finally, COCAs unique interface allows for features of metalinguistic awareness to easily be analyzed. The corpus is already tagged for part of speech and register information, and easily searches for collocates, synonyms, sub-registers, overall frequency and frequency over time. For users interested in more than vocabulary, COCA also allows users to search for grammatical forms, and patterns. The variety of search options in the corpus facilitates vocabulary study well. Because COCA is free and accessible to all those with an internet connection, it allows for DDL opportunities worldwide. For a complete review of the features of COCA see Davies (2009) and Davies (2010) as well as the many tutorials and introductions available for novice users on the COCA website.