Corpora and Concordancers in ESL/EFL Class:

Truly Authentic Language for Language Learning.

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Concordancers are search engines.

A Corpus is a collection of language texts

Key Word in Context (KWIC, Concordance) is a list of words in context.

Definitions to the main terms

Some online free corporaSome Online Free Corpora with Concordancing Software

•The Corpus of Contemporary American English

(www.americancorpus.org)

•Collins Wordbanks Online

(http://www.collinslanguage.com/content-solutions/wordbanks)

•The Compleat Lexical Tutor•British National Corpus•WebCorp•WebCONC •MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English)•Web Concordancer•Online KWIC Concordancer

Some Uses of Concordancing.Some Uses of Concordancing.

•Prepare language teaching materials and activities.•Do research-based self-correction of errors through self formulation of grammar rules.•Give more context to unknown vocabulary or newly learned vocabulary.•Find the most frequent words or phrases related to specific topics. •Compare synonyms.•Find word collocations.•Find overly-used words from your own collection of papers. •Compare written and spoken language.•Study development of language by comparing data from different time periods•Investigate cultural habits.

Am I using it right?

• Which preposition is used with a certain verb, noun

• Whether a piece of language you want to use sounds natural

Which one is correct?

a) in east

b) on east

c) in the east

d) on the east

To freak out

“China is totally freaking out Japan.

Big bad China. The Mainland. The second biggest economy on Earth. Communism. And a whole military complex. Neighboring Japan is worried.”

Comparing Genres

Comparing Time Periodsfrom www.americancorpus.org

Learner CorpusLEARNER CORPUS

You can create your own corpus from learner texts and analyze it.

*To be able to do that you also need a concardancer!

Using corpora in class is very beneficial because:

•It provides quick and easy access to huge amounts of language data.

•It facilitates access to lexical and grammatical structures.

•It shows what is preferred rather than what is right or wrong.

•It provides exposure to real language that learners may encounter.

•It allows learners to do self-driven exploration; Language learners may retain better if they formulate the rules themselves.

•It encourages learners to become active, autonomous researchers of the target language.