From Corpus To Classroom: Language Use And Lang...
In recent decades, how to help students learn and discover language rules from authentic language data inductively has posed a significant challenge for English language teachers. Traditional tools (e.g., textbooks, dictionaries, reference books, etc.) and teacher intuition are unable to fully address this issue. This is an area where corpus linguistics can fill the gap. With the use of corpora, teachers and students can effectively study naturally occurring English language and summarise grammatical patterns and word usage. In addition, teachers can develop corpus-based hands-on activities that can cater to students at different proficiency levels. Students can also use corpora to explore authentic language data and answer their own queries about English language usage and become independent and autonomous language learners.
From Corpus to Classroom: language use and lang...
For teachers, a corpus is a high-speed teaching tool and provides high-quality language samples that can be adapted to create various activities such as gap filling or cloze test for target learners. Moreover, corpora can help teachers encourage active and student-centred learning.
A concordance line is a line of text taken from a corpus. Each concordance line in a set includes the keyword, that is, the word being studied, and the sentence where the keyword is situated. By reading concordance lines presented in key-word-in-context (KWIC) format, students can obtain and retain certain lexico-grammatical patterns (e.g., collocations) of the target word. Learners can also be guided to observe concordance lines and summarise the language use patterns, which help them to identify and correct their own lexico-grammatical errors.
While the specific search functions of different corpus websites may vary, their major functions are to help users explore form, meaning and use of words and provide large amount of authentic evidence to generalize language use pattern. In this section, we will introduce some key functions of two online corpora to show how corpus tools may facilitate language learning and teaching.
The four design principles serve as the initial guidance for teachers and student teachers to design many successful corpus-based lessons available on the website Corpus-Aided Platform for Language Teachers (CAP) developed at the Education University of Hong Kong by a group of corpus linguists. An analysis of all the corpus-based lesson materials found that the well-designed lessons shared three characteristics, which were also important issues to consider when designing corpus-based lessons for classroom teaching, namely how to provide guidance/training for students, balancing the use of corpus and non-corpus resources and creating language use opportunities.
Corpus resources and tools can provide answers to questions of what, which, how and how often regarding word frequency, collocations, synonyms, register, etc. However, corpora cannot answer the questions of why, that is, why should language be used in a particular way and for what purposes; nor can corpora tell us directly how to distinguish between a new norm and a mistake in language. How to make use of corpora to answer the why questions and to create genuine language use opportunities are entirely at the hands of the teachers. Finally, teachers should be very selective in dealing with concordance lines and be strategic in integrating corpus resources into classroom teaching to facilitate student language learning.
Qing MA is an associate professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. Her main research interests include second language vocabulary acquisition, corpus linguistics, computer assisted language learning (CALL) and mobile assisted language learning (MALL).
Fang MEI is a Research Associate at the Education University of Hong Kong. She received an M.A. in TESOL from The Education University of Hong Kong. She has been a TOEFL teacher, a teacher trainer, and now a researcher. Her research interests include computer assisted language learning (CALL), especially corpus-based language teaching & learning, and teacher training.
In addition, Clancy elaborates building a corpus to represent a variety of a language. Clancy defines variety as it is variant of a language that differs from another variant of the same language systematically and coherently (cited in McEnery, et al., 2006, p.90 idea). Accordingly, corpus designer has to consider size, diversity of texts, text length and number, representativeness, and balance of corpus for its varieties. The last chapter of this section is about building a specialized audio-visual corpus by Thompson. According to the author, building audio-visual is a challenging task in the area of corpus linguists. In addition, collecting raw data, preparing transcriptions, and annotating are identified as the crucial issues to design specialized corpora.
The other issue that is stated in this section is how a corpus is used to explore patterns by Hunston. Hunston defines the idea of patterns and the difficulty of patterns to spot and how to read concordances are mentioned. Tribble also explains the idea of concordances. In line with this, concordances before the computer age, approaches, tools, and resources for computer generated concordance, and working with corpus data are discussed. The other important issue that is discussed by Lu is corpus software and language development. According to Lu (p.184) language development is the process in which the language faculty develops in human being. Thus, Lu addresses measuring language development, using corpus to find more about first and second language development.
The intent of section four is to introduce the use of corpus for a language research. Moon explains the way to learn and to search lexis, phraseologies, and different kinds of meanings (context meaning, polysemy, metaphor, connotation, and ideology), sets and synonyms (lexical sets, synonyms, annotations, and opposite) through corpus. In addition, lexis in spoken language (phraseology, meaning, and usage) is also highlighted.
The main intent of section five is to explain using corpus for language pedagogy and methodology. This section starts with the work of Cheng, what can a corpus can tell us about language teaching. Hence the author demonstrates corpora and language teaching, corpus-driven form and function, corpus evidence as teaching materials, tasks for language learning, bridging corpus linguistics and language teaching. Walsh explains features of spoken and written corpora in creating language teaching materials and syllabus. Thus, integrating corpus-based approaches in syllabus, corpus based materials to teach speaking and listening skills, using corpus-based materials to teach reading and writing, and exploiting learner corpora are explained. Chambers devotes on data-driven learning. The author provides detail examples and activities that can be applied in language teaching classrooms through data driven learning approach. Similarly, Gilquin and Granger elucidate the pedagogical function of data driven learning (DDL). Hence, assessing the effectiveness of DDL and the problems and limitation of DDL are mentioned. Furthermore, Sripicharn discusses preparing learners for using language corpora. Therefore, finding out what students know and providing general information, identifying task, objectives and types of corpora, preparing corpus data, corpus analysis tools and interpreting corpus results are explained.
The sixth section, designing corpus-based material for the language classroom, starts by the work of Jones and Durrant, what can a corpus tell us about vocabulary teaching material. The authors explain that corpus offers list of key vocabulary that are used to course design and material writing. Thus, vocabulary importance is recognized as reliable data for language learners. In the same way, corpus also plays a key role to develop material to teach grammar. Hence, Hughes discusses corpus to grammar teaching materials, and the author considers benefits of using corpus to teach grammar, and future development perspectives.
This handbook is user friendly and effective handbook. It raises one of potentially pivotal issues in English language pedagogy, second and foreign language research, and language analysis. The main contribution of this handbook is that it addresses issues step-by step on how to use corpus linguistics in language classroom, material and syllabus design, testing and language analysis accompanied by cases studies, implications and clear examples. In addition, the authors demonstrate how corpus linguistics application is widening to computational linguistics, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, creative writing and translation. The handbook could be considered as marvelous starting point for further in depth investigation and discussion on corpus linguistics.
Moreover, detail reference books are provided in each chapter for further reading. These help readers to consider various issues of corpus linguistics application. Besides, the handbook provides a step by step guide how to assemble and to design different kinds of corpora. These could give the opportunity to language teachers and researchers easily duplicate or apply corpus linguistics in their research and classrooms. Hence, this handbook fills the gap that exist using corpus linguistics application in a wider contexts. The handbook could be invaluable resources for undergraduate students, postgraduate students, language teachers and researchers who want to engage in corpus related issues. It would also be a primary interest of researchers and language teachers who have less exposure on corpus linguistics and its application.
This handbook is an introductory handbook and I would like to suggest some points. Firstly, the handbook lacks inconsistency on its organization. I observed that similar issues that have similar concepts have addressed indifferent sections. For instance, instead of putting using corpus to language testing and teacher education in section VIII, they should be placed on section V, using corpus for language pedagogy and methodology since these issues are very interrelated. Though the organization is approached thematically, identical concepts are placed in different sections. In addition, the two sections in the introduction part have similar concepts. The authors address similar concepts which could be mentioned in one section. Despite this short coming, this comprehensive volume has achieved its purpose and can make very practical contribution to corpus linguistics. 041b061a72