Corpora and language learning

From corpus to classroom – next 3 weeks Examine the move from language description to language teaching Consider the issues – pros and cons (and the slowness of adoption of corpus-based approaches).

Syllabus design Corpus-informed syllabus design features: Frequency information (implicitly) Focus on lexical phrases (lexicogrammar) Units include typical (frequent) language usage The issue remains of what kind of usage to include. (A general English does not exist.)

Syllabus design Strong lexical approach (Sinclair and Renouf 1988; Willis 1990) -- words are all you need Use frequency information (commonest words) Main usage patterns Collocations Where is grammar? Think of grammar in terms of a sequence or words or word types Consider the most frequent words in a grammar pattern

Willis Handout: from language data to teaching materials (Not an activity for individual teachers) Ideas associated with the COBUILD books

Passive We have looked at some aspects of the passive Considered the frequent words used in the passive in the Times corpus Looked briefly at the functions of the passive Biber et al. Corpus-based description of the passive

Lexical syllabus Willis argues that “English is a lexical language” passive is best seen as BE plus adjective/past participle Lewis makes the same points about grammar (Michael Lewis – The Lexical Approach) (Dave Willis – The Lexical Syllabus)

Syllabus design – Michael Lewis Weak lexical approach -- Lewis (The Lexical Approach versus the Lexical Syllabus) Shift fulcrum from grammar to lexis “Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar” Less emphasis on frequency and corpus analysis Students don’t work with corpora directly

Lewis Handout – different types of exercise Perhaps these are quite common now since collocations are seen to be an important part of language knowledge

Materials development In the Sinclair -- Willis -- COBUILD tradition, teaching materials come directly from the corpus Frequent words and patterns are identified and then included in teaching materials

Materials development Sinclair assumes that when you have the corpus description, you have the language course Lewis -- advocates exposure to authentic language, but is not keen on using corpora Lewis wants to create materials based on (his) pedagogical principles Now ESL books have more of a focus on lexis and corpus-informed materials. E.g., Touchstone and many other CUP books

Materials development Issue is how to structure a language course What is the content (deciding on what to include)? How is the material sequenced? How is the material taught? What are the student activities? Including more lexis makes these issues more complicated – lexical knowledge is like a very extensive network

Materials development COBUILD – Phrasal verbs Tribble – Concordance examples

Corpus data in the classroom Some advantages Students exposed to authentic usage, typical uses, collocations etc. Students process data themselves leading to deeper learning (student as researcher -- Gavioli) Noticing/awareness-raising is useful Exposure to multiple forms/meanings/uses Disadvantages Not directly communicative Authentic language is specific and difficult Boring for some students

Corpus data - raw or processed Raw data -- simple corpus (Lonely hearts ads) Raw data -- advanced students, working with the teacher Raw data -- small samples. Complement to textbook? Processed data -- selection of data to produce worksheets (perhaps as a sequence) Processed data -- modification of examples

Pros and Cons What are the pros and cons of using corpus/concordance data (in different configurations)? Hunston – p193 Corpora are not real in that they are decontextualised Other inputs apart from corpora and frequency data should be used in designing materials Is a corpus of native-speaker language relevant (ELF) Comfort zone – rules are more comforting

Corpus data in the classroom Corpus as a reference (query the corpus to answer language questions) Inductive exercises Students given corpus data to classify Students have to discover/create the categories Deductive exercises Students provided with the categories Students have to find/identify the examples that fit the categories