1. Corpora and language learning

2. 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).

3. 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.)

4. 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

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

6. 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

7. 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)

8. 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

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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. Materials development
COBUILD – Phrasal verbs
Tribble – Concordance examples

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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