1. Presented by Jennifer Robison TexTESOL II March 12, 2010 San Antonio, TX

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

3.  “…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

4.  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

5.  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)

6.  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)

7.  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

8.  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

9.  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)

10.  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

11.  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

12.  Demonstration of classroom activities – see handout  Some additional resources – see handout

13.  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. 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.

14.  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.

15.  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.