Online Corpora in L2 Writing Class

Zawan Al BulushiIndiana University Bloomington

November 15, 2014

2014

Outline• What do students need to know about a word to use it correctly in a

composition?

• Corpus-based language instruction.

• Key terms.

• Types of corpora.

• Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

• Practical Applications.

• www.wordand phrase.info.

• How can COCA help learners in writing?

• Why not just use Google?

• Differences between corpora and electronic dictionaries.

• Concerns about concordancing.

• Using COCA.

Why can’t I say…?

S: Teacher, can I say “make” my homeworks?T: No, you can’t. We say “do” homework.S: But I say “make” in Arabic.T: Well, you can’t in English. We “do” homework.S: But why can’t I say “make”?T: Because you can’t.S: But I think I heard someone say “make”, are you suuure?

T: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!Source: YouTube video

What do students need to know about a word to use it correctly in a composition?

• Meanings in different contexts.

• Collocations

• Lexical patterns (lexicogrammar)

• Register

Corpus-based Language Learning

• Corpus research is an emerging and a promising field in second language pedagogy.

• Corpora and concordances are considered as significant resources for L2 teaching and learning.

• A broad agreement that integrating corpora in EFL classrooms promotes language development .

Learner Concordancing

• Researchers have found that direct corpus use by learners or

learner concordancing has clear advantages to students' L2

writing.

• Positive attitude towards corpus use has been reported in a

number of studies.

Key Terms

A Corpus

A corpus is a large, principled collection of naturally occurring texts

(written or spoken) stored electronically. (Pl corpora)(Rippen, 2010)

Concordancer

A computer software that is able to search rapidly through large quantities of

text for a target item ( morpheme, word, or phrase) and print out all the examples

it finds in the context in which they appear.

A concordance

A list of all words found in a specific text or set of texts.

Concordancing

A way to access a corpus of texts in order to show how a word or

expression was used in a given context.

Types of Corpora

Corpus of Contemporary American English

(COCA)

Principled collection of texts?

Conference

Usage? increasing / decreasingGenre/style of speech?

Practical Applications

Standard Interface

In the modern world, media have been becoming a major source to

catch information.

People require the fundamental knowledge…

Fundamental or basic? Which one is more natural or appropriate with

knowledge?

Fundamental/Basic Knowledge

Comparison

•What is the difference between small and little, or Which is

more common:  small businesses or little businesses?

Synonyms

•What are the synonyms of beautiful? Which ones are much

more common in fiction than in academic?

•What are the only two (besides beautiful) that are quite

common in academic?

The new process is a considerable advance in technology.

A considerable advance

How many…….

Collocates

I applied to/for a part time job as a waiter in a restaurant.

Apply to/for

Alternative Interface

www.wordandphrase.info

How can COCA help Learners in writing?

• Use of particular constructions, such as which preposition is used with a

certain verb, or whether a given phrase sounds natural

• Frequency of words or phrases in different styles of English (such as

spoken, fiction, or academic)

• Collocations: What a word means, or how it is used, by looking at other

words that occur nearby.

• Synonyms of a given word.

• Comparisons of all of the synonyms. Differences in meaning between

two words such as big / little, rob / steal.

Why not just use Google?

• Looking at differences between different styles or types of

English. 

•Measuring changes over time

•Grammar-based searches. 

• Semantically-based searches( collocates, comparisons,

synonyms) 

• Searching for strings of words. 

Differences between Corpora and Electronic Dictionaries

•Authentic texts/examples

• Frequency of usage over time.

• Collocates

•Genres

Concerns about Concordancing

• Performing searching techniques.• Choosing a suitable concordancing program.•Amount of training.• Language Proficiency

Proper training and assistance to all language levels when involved in learner concordancing.

Exercises

• Find adjectives with woman in fiction.

• How frequent is mysterious in different styles of English?

• Find synonyms of strong in fiction and academic.

• Find synonyms for improve when used with performance.

• Find synonyms of smart in spoken/ academic.

• Find prepositions preceded by enroll.

• How frequent is the phrase “Think out of the box”.

Using COCA

• Learn to search COCA yourself.

• Take the “tour” of the site and familiarize yourself with what you can do and how.

• Lear from the videos on YouTube on how to use COCA.

• Practice doing searches while you are doing your writings.

zalbulus@Indiana.edu