Using Online Corpora in the Adult ESL Classroom

Presented by Jennifer RobisonTexTESOL II

March 12, 2010San Antonio, TX

Overview Definitions Effects on language theory Research in applied linguistics How teachers can use corpora Why teachers should use corpora Limitations Example activities - handout

What is a linguistic corpus? “…a collection of naturally occurring

examples of language…which have been collected for linguistic study…that are stored and accessed electronically.” (Hunston, 2002, p. 2)

Composition planned Texts annotated or “marked up” Includes a concordancing program

A few examples The Brown Corpus – 1964 The University of Birmingham• The Birmingham Collection of English Text – 70’s• The National Bank of English – 80’s• The Cobuild Project – 90’s

The Michigan Corpus of American Spoken English – 2002 – 1.8 million words

The Corpus of Contemporary American English – 2008 – 410 million words, 21 million added per year

The effect on theories of language

The corpus linguistic approach –accurate descriptions of language and language use (Barbieri & Eckhardt, 2007)

Have prompted some to “view grammar as a systematic collection of observations about the way words behave rather than a set of abstractions (Hunston & Francis, 1998, p. 2)

Lexico-grammatical approach (Liu & Jiang, 2009)

Phraseology (Hunston, 2002)

Implications for language learning and teaching

Teach patterns and phrases Lexical priming (Hoey, 2004)• Cumulative effects of encounters with word

– learn collocates, grammatical and textual functions

• Ensure students encounter lexis in such a way that it is correctly primed (e.g. vocabulary lists are innapropriate)

Corpora in applied linguistics Investigate differences between actual

language use and what is presented in dictionaries, grammars, and textbooks

Comparison of language use between genres, modes, registers, sociolinguistic contexts

Child language acquisition Historical changes Contrastive analysis Critical linguistics Learner language acquisition Natural speech processing

How teachers can use corpora

Outside the classroom• To decide what to teach• To check their own intuitions• Find good examples

Inside the classroom -create activities in which students explore corpora themselves

Learner-centeredcorpus-based activities

Deductive – Ss given a rule, explore corpora to see if rule holds

Inductive – Ss guided to explore corpora to form generalizations about usage patterns, collocations, rules• Data-driven learning (Hunston, 2002)• Discovery learning (Bernardini, 2004)

Why use inductive, corpus-based activities?

Authenticity of materials Student autonomy and motivation

(Bernardini, 2004) Interesting and effective (Liu & Jiang,

2009) Promote noticing Used with pair interaction – promotes

metalinguistic awareness Critical thinking

Caveats and limitations Is it really “authentic”? Can be difficult and time-consuming May be overwhelming/confusing to students A corpus can only attest to what has been

said, not what is “not possible” Spoken language – will contain false starts,

performance errors, non-standard usage – may be confusing

Some Ss not comfortable with approach Teacher guidance still critical

Some easy but practical examples

Demonstration of classroom activities – see handout

Some additional resources – see handout

Works Cited Barbieri, F., & Eckhardt, S. (2007). Applying corpus-based findings to form-

focused instruction: The case of reported speech. Language Teaching Research, 11(3), 319-346.

Bernardini, S. (2004). Corpora in the classroom: An overview and some reflections on future developments. In J. Sinclair (Ed.), How to use corpora in language teaching (15-36). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins North America.

Biber, D., & Gray, B. (2010). Challenging Stereotypes about Academic Writing: Complexity, Elaboration, Explicitness. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 9(1), 2-20.

Biber, D., & Reppen, R. (2002). What Does Frequency Have To Do with Grammar Teaching? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24(2), 199-208.

Davies, M. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 410+ million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://www.americancorpus.org.

Davies, M. (2004). Student use of large, annotated corpora to analyze syntactic variation. In D. Steward, S. Bernardini, & G. Aston (Eds.), Corpora and language learners (257-269). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins North America.

Works Cited (cont.) Hoey, M. (2004). The textual priming of lexis. In D. Steward,

S. Bernardini, & G. Aston (Eds.), Corpora and language learners (21-41). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins North America.

Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hunston, S, & Francis, G. (1998). Verbs observed: A corpus-driven pedagogic grammar. Applied Linguistics,19(1), 45-72.

Kaltenböch, G., & Mehlmauer-Larcher, B. (2005). Computer corpora and the language classroom: on the potential and limitations of computer corpora in language teaching. ReCALL : the Journal of EUROCALL, 17(1), 65-84. 

Liu, D., & Jiang, P. (2009). Using a Corpus-Based Lexicogrammatical Approach to Grammar Instruction in EFL and ESL Contexts. Modern Language Journal, 93(1), 61-78.

Works Cited (cont.) Meyer, C. F. (2002). English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press. Mauranen, A. (2004). Corpus linguistics, language variation, and

language teaching. In J. Sinclair (Ed.), How to use corpora in language teaching (67-85). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins North America.

Römer, U. (2004). A corpus-driven approach to modal auxiliaries and their didactics. In J. Sinclair (Ed.), How to use corpora in language teaching (185-199). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins North America.

Simpson, R. C., S. L. Briggs, J. Ovens, and J. M. Swales. (2002) The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan.

Thornbury, S. (1999). How to teach grammar. Essex, UK: Pearson Longman.

Tsui, A. (2004). What teachers have always wanted to know – and how corpora can help. In J. Sinclair (Ed.), How to use corpora in language teaching (39-61). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins North America.