Corpus Linguistics

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Corpus Linguistics 1 / 12

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Despite the obvious and recognised strengths of corpus use in a pedagogical context, there is a strong resistance towards corpora in ELT.

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Theindirect use of corporain teaching:

I to inform the content of ELT materials and syllabuses

I to inform test design

e.g. CoBuild series of dictionaries and reference books face2face

Touchstone

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Thedirect use of corporain teaching:

I using corpus data in the classroom and enabling learners to access corpora for autonomous study

The direct use of corpora in the classroom: data-driven learning (DDL)

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In DDL,

I learners may be given aconcordanceprintout containing numerous instances of a particular word or phrase presented with brief co-text.

I learners are asked to make observations on its meaning, use and grammatical properties based on the evidence.

e.g. correcting students who say‘responsible of ’vs.‘responsible for’

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Teaching-oriented corpus development:

I developing corpora of learner English

I corpora of L1 language development

I corpora of English for Specific Purposes

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A small but useful written corpus can be built in a matter of hours.

I a quick and dirty corpus:quick, dirty (imperfect), effective

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Why would we want to compile a small corpus (e.g. music teaching English)?

I to be able to meet the precise needs of our learners by providing a corpus which addresses their specialism and/or which is suitable for their level of English

e.g. a course for Spanish teachers of music to help them to prepare to deliver music lessons in English

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finite/limited data size:

I ‘natural language is infinite, and a corpus can’t describe a natural language entirely.’

frequency difference:

I skewed data

not a study discipline but a meremethodology

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→ With a finite set of rules (recursive phrase structure rules, competence), infinite number of sentences can be created.

Corpora (i.e. limited number of sentences,performance) can never describe competence (natural language) adequately; Performance (e.g. corpora) is a poor mirror of competence.

⇒ Corpus could never be a useful tool for the linguist, as the linguist should seek to model language competence rather than performance.

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Competence (I-Language) vs. performance (E-language)

Rationalist (artificially constructed data) vs. empiricist (naturally occurring data)

Subjective language description (introspective judgements) vs. objective language description (corpus-based observations)

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“The official news agency carried excerpts from a speech by Brezhnev at a Kremlin dinner for visiting Cambodian leader Heng Samrin.”

I S→NP VP

I NP→AT N

I NP→AT NPP

I PP→PrepNP

I VP→V JP

I JP→J

I NP→PropN

I NP→PropN PP