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Corpus and language teaching

Abstract
Corpus linguistics is an area of applied linguistics that uses computer technology to analyze large
collections of spoken and written texts, or corpora, which have been carefully designed to
represent specific domains of language use, such as informal conversation or academic writing.
The most established strand of corpus use in language learning lies in the use of corpus analysis
in syllabus design and in the creation of teaching materials. More controversial is the use of
corpora and concordance by language students directly.

Corpus and language teaching

Introduction
In recent years a lot of investigation has been devoted to how computers can facilitate language
learning. One specific area on the computer frontier which still remains quite open to
exploration is corpus linguistics.

What is Corpus Linguistics?

Corpus linguistics is the study of language on large collection of real life language use stored
in corpora (or corpora)computerized databases created for linguistics research. Also known as
corpus-based studies.

Corpora, Concordancing, and Usage

In order to conduct a study of language which is corpus-based, it is necessary to gain access to a
corpus and a concordancing program. A corpus consists of a databank of natural texts, compiled
from writing and/or a transcription of recorded speech. A concordancer is a software program
which analyzes corpora and lists the results. The main focus of corpus linguistics is to discover
patterns of authentic language use through analysis of actual usage. The aim of a corpus based
analysis is not to generate theories of what is possible in the language. Corpus linguistics only
concern is the usage patterns of the empirical data and what that reveals to us about language
behavior. Corpus linguistics has provided a new weapon for translation studies, broadened the
research scope and introduced a brand-new thought pattern for translation scholars.

Applying Corpus Linguistics to Teaching

WHAT TO TEACH WITH A CORPUS?

Vocabulary, word meanings in context, combinations/collocations, parts of speech, common

expressions, differences in meaning Grammar, differences between similar forms, how forms
are used in context Pragmatics (greetings, genre features and their cultural meanings e.g. job
letters, CVs, personal letters, etc.)

Corpus and language teaching

SPECIFIC APPLICATIONS OF CORPORA FOR TEACHING

Use contextualized examples for quizzes, activities, explanations Share lists of frequent words
or expressions with learners Research features of language for lesson design (e.g., Are the
modals can, could, may, might, shall, will equally use? Should they be equally taught?) Preselect materials from corpora to help learners discover/explore particular language patterns
have students search corpora using a search tool CLA and CALPER at Penn State.

INDIRECT USE OF CORPORA

The use of corpora in language teaching and learning has been more indirect than direct. This is
perhaps because the direct use of corpora in language pedagogy is restricted by a number of
factors including, for example, the level and experience of learners, time constraints, curricular
requirements, knowledge and skills required of teachers for corpus analysis and pedagogical
mediation, and the access to resources such as computers, and appropriate software tools and
corpora, or a combination of these.

Direct use of corpora

While indirect uses such as syllabus design and materials development are closely associated
with what to teach, corpora have also provided valuable insights into how to teach. Of Leechs
(1997) three focuses, direct uses of corpora include teaching about, teaching to exploit, and
exploiting to teach, with the latter two relating to how to use.
Teaching about means teaching corpus linguistics as an academic subject like other subdisciplines of linguistics such as syntax and pragmatics. Corpus linguistics has now found its
way into the curricula for linguistics and language related degree programmes at both
postgraduate and undergraduate levels in many universities around the world.

Teaching to exploit means providing students with hands-on know-how, as emphasized in

McEnery, Xiao and Tono (2006), so that they can exploit corpora for their own purposes. Once
the student has acquired the necessary knowledge and techniques of corpus-based language
study, the learning activity may become student centred.

Corpus and language teaching

Exploiting to teach means using a corpus-based approach to teaching language and linguistics
courses (e.g. sociolinguistics and discourse analysis), which would otherwise be taught using
non-corpus-based methods.

THREE REALMS OF BARLOW

According to Barlow (2002), three realms in which corpus linguistics can be applied to teaching
are syllabus design, materials development, and classroom activities.

Syllabus Design
The syllabus organizes the teacher's decisions regarding the focus of a class with respect to the
students needs. Frequency and register information could be quite helpful in course planning
choices. By conducting an analysis of a corpus which is relevant to the purpose a particular class,
the teacher can determine what language items are linked to the target register.

Materials Development
The development of materials often relies on a developer's intuitive sense of what students need
to learn. With the help of a corpus, a materials developer could create exercises based on real
examples which provide students with an opportunity to discover features of language use. In
this scenario, the materials developer could conduct the analysis or simply use a published
corpus study as a reference guide.

Classroom Activities
These can consist of hands on student-conducted language analyses in which the students use a
concordancing program and a deliberately chosen corpus to make their own discoveries about
language use. The teacher can guide a predetermined investigation which will lead to predictable
results or can have the students do it on their own, leading to less predictable findings. This
exemplifies data driven learning, which encourages learner autonomy by training students to
draw their own conclusions about language use.

Corpora in the classroom: Data-driven learning (DLL)

Corpus and language teaching

Corpora and corpus material can be used in the classroom in several ways. For instance, teachers
can use computer-generated concordances and develop activities and exercises to have students
explore regularities of patterning in the target language. DDL activities can range from teacherled and relatively closed concordance-based exercises to entirely learner-centered corpusbrowsing projects which involve a high degree of learner autonomy.

Language testing
Another emerging area of language pedagogy which has started to use the corpus-based approach
is language testing. Alderson (1996) envisaged the following possible uses of corpora in this
area: test construction, compilation and selection, test presentation, response capture, test
scoring, and calculation and delivery of results. He concludes that the potential advantages of
basing our tests on real language data, of making data-based judgments about candidates
abilities, knowledge and performance are clear enough. A crucial question is whether the
possible advantages are born out in practice (Alderson 1996: 258-259). The concern raised in
Aldersons conclusion appears to have been addressed satisfactorily now so that nowadays
computer-based tests are recognized as being comparable to paper-based tests (e.g. computerbased versus paper-based TOEFL tests).
Indeed, corpora have recently been used by major providers of test services for a number
of purposes:

as an archive of examination scripts;

to develop test materials;

to optimize test procedures;

to improve the quality of test marking;

to validate tests; and

to standardize tests.

Teacher/Student Roles and Benefits

Corpus and language teaching

The teacher would act as a research facilitator rather than the more traditional imparter of
knowledge. The benefit of such student-centered discovery learning is that the students are given
access to the facts of authentic language use, which comes from real contexts rather than being
constructed for pedagogical purposes, and are challenged to construct generalizations and note
patterns of language behavior. Even if this kind of study does not have immediately quantifiable
results, studying concordances can make students more aware of language use.

According to Willis (1998), students may be able to determine:

the potential different meanings and uses of common words

useful phrases and typical collocations they might use themselves

the structure and nature of both written and spoken discourse

that certain language features are more typical of some kinds of text than others

Barlow (1992) suggests that a corpus and concordancer can be used to:

compare language use--student/native speaker, standard English/scientific English,

written/spoken

analyze the language in books, readers, and course books

generate exercises and student activities

Analyze usage--when is it appropriate to use obtain rather than get?

examine word order

compare similar words--ask vs. request

The link between findings of corpus-based research and (foreign) language teaching is that
corpus evidence suggests which language items and processes are most likely to be encountered
by language users (what is frequent and typical) and may thus deserve more time in classroom
instruction. Corpora and corpus-data

Help teachers and students make better informed decisions and improve teaching material
to become more authentic, i.e. representative of contemporary usage. Traditional
textbooks often include simplified, non-authentic English and invented sentences which
rarely, if at all, occur in natural speech situations.

provide "real English" and reveal what native speakers typically write or say in natural
discourse as to

Corpus and language teaching

o lexical co-occurrence patterns (collocation, colligation, semantic prosody)
o the most common meaning if a word has several senses
o items that are frequent in or across different text types

Help students to develop their own descriptive and analytical skills which improves
language awareness.

Problematic Issues Involved

Several challenges are involved in implementing the use of a corpus for the purpose of teaching.
The first is that of corpus selection. For some teaching purposes, any large corpus will serve.
Some corpora are available on-line for free or on disk. But the teacher needs to make sure that
the corpus is useful for the particular teaching context and is representative of the target register.

Another option is to construct a corpus, especially when the target register is highly specific.
This can be done by using a textbook, course reader, or a bunch of articles which the students
have to read or are representative of what they have to read.

A corpus does not need to be large in order to be effective. The primary consideration is that of
relevance to the students--it ought to be selected with the learning objectives of the class in mind,
matching the purpose for learning with the corpus.

Related to the issue of corpus selection is that of corpus bias, which can cause frustration for the
teacher and student. This is because the data can be misleading; if one uses a very large general
corpus, it may obscure the register variation which reveals important contextual information
about language use. The pitfall is that a corpus may tell us more about itself than about language
use.

Another obstacle to confront is the comprehensibility issue: if you use concordancing in a class,
it can be quite difficult for the students (or even the teacher) to understand the data that it
provides.

Lastly, the issue of learning style differences--for some students, discovery learning is simply not
the optimal approach. All of these points reinforce the caveat that careful consideration is

Corpus and language teaching

required before a new technology is introduced in the classroom, especially one which has not
been thoroughly explored and streamlined.

Exploiting a Corpus for a Classroom Activity

Although corpora may sound reasonable in theory, applying it to the classroom is challenging
because the information it provides appears to be so chaotic. For this reason, it is the teacher's
responsibility to harness a corpus by filtering the data for the students. Susan Conrad (2000)
suggests that materials writers take register specific corpus studies into account. Biber, Conrad
and Reppen (1998) emphasize the need for materials writers to acknowledge the frequency
which corpus studies reveal of words and structures in their materials design.

Conclusion
We can conclude that the use of corpus linguistics in language learning and teaching is very
important and helpful for teachers and students. While conducting corpus based study of
language it is necessary to gain access to a corpus and concordance program though it is very
helpful in number of ways but teachers must be careful about the use of corpus for pedagogical
reason. Applying corpus linguistics to teaching can help in syllabus design .material development
.and classroom activities. We can learn word meanings .vocabulary. Parts of speech .collocations.
Common expression and many more. We can also use Corpus in language testing, evaluating and
to develop different skills. The use of corpus linguistics is very essential for pedagogy. This area
must be further developed so that teachers and students can gain more benefits from it.

Corpus and language teaching

REFERENCE
http://www.english-linguistics.uni-mainz.de/232.php
https://www.google.com.pk
http://iteslj.org/Articles/Krieger-Corpus.html
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
http://www.slideshare.net/