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12 Metalinguistic awareness and vocabulary teaching are greatly informed by corpus linguistics.

. 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.

The Corpus of Contemporary American English


In order to provide a useful tool for DDL, an appropriate corpus must be selected, particularly one that enables study of metalinguistic awareness and is accessible enough for DDL. All activities in this book are based on The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2008-). Principle reasons for using COCA are its large size, diverse structure, focus on American English, user-friendly interface, easy accessibility and ability to show features of vocabulary learning. While other free corpora exist, COCA, created by Mark Davies in 2008, is the largest, free English corpus available and has significant advantages over other free corpora (Davies, 2009). In terms of vocabulary study, COCA has definite advantages. First, COCA currently has over 425+ million words, with 20 million words being added on a yearly basis. Such a large size gives a sufficient patterning of English lexis and grammar without misrepresenting outliers as the norm (Davies, 2009). In terms of vocabulary, this means that the corpus will give an appropriate picture of word frequency in terms of how they are really used. Second, COCA has the benefit of being a balanced corpus in terms of register, or type of language being used. The corpus is

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.

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