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Lecture Corpora and Language Teaching Slides

This document discusses how corpora can be used for language teaching in 3 main ways: 1. Corpora can be used as a source of authentic language examples and data to determine what language features to teach and influence syllabus design. Corpora provide evidence of actual language usage that may contradict teachers' intuitions. 2. Data-driven learning uses corpora to promote learner-centered exploration of language patterns through corpus analysis tasks. This helps learners discover linguistic rules independently and enhances awareness of how language works. 3. Learner corpora collected from language learners can provide insights into the language acquisition process and common learner errors. This can inform strategies for improving language instruction and resources like learner dictionaries.

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Faiza Shafique
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130 views30 pages

Lecture Corpora and Language Teaching Slides

This document discusses how corpora can be used for language teaching in 3 main ways: 1. Corpora can be used as a source of authentic language examples and data to determine what language features to teach and influence syllabus design. Corpora provide evidence of actual language usage that may contradict teachers' intuitions. 2. Data-driven learning uses corpora to promote learner-centered exploration of language patterns through corpus analysis tasks. This helps learners discover linguistic rules independently and enhances awareness of how language works. 3. Learner corpora collected from language learners can provide insights into the language acquisition process and common learner errors. This can inform strategies for improving language instruction and resources like learner dictionaries.

Uploaded by

Faiza Shafique
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Corpora and

Language Teaching
Corpora and Language Teaching
1. Language teaching
2. Data-driven learning
3. Learner corpora
1. Language teaching
• Corpora as a source of material/examples
• Corpora determine the syllabus
– Deciding what to teach and when can be
influenced by how widespread a phenomenon
is in the language
– Teachers’ (and text books’) preconceptions
are often wrong
– (Same issue in lexicography)
Language teaching
• Corpora as a source of explanation
– Students often ask about subtle differences in
language
– e.g. differences between close synonyms,
especially when the L1 doesn’t make a similar
distinction
– Corpus evidence can be better than teachers’
intuitions
Examples
• big vs large
• finally vs lastly
• less than vs fewer than
– prescritpive grammar books can be at odds
with actual usage
• Sentence-initial conjunctions
2. Data-driven learning
• Part of drive to use new technology to enhance
language learning
• Focus on exploitation of authentic materials
– even for tasks such as acquisition of grammatical
structures and lexical items
• Focus on real, exploratory tasks and activities
rather than traditional “drill & kill” exercises
• Learner-centred activities
• Use and exploitation of tools rather than ready-
made or off-the-shelf learnware
Task-based learning
• Acquisition of language and linguistic
competence as well as language and language
learning awareness can best be realised through
tasks which encourage the learner not to focus
explicitly on the structure and the rules of the
new language. Learners will acquire the form of
the foreign language because they are engaged
in exploring aspects of the target language on
the basis of authentic content.
Use of materials
• Not just use of real language in realistic situations
(mainstay of language-teaching methodology since
1960s: “Communicative language teaching theory”,
though starting to be disparaged, and “pedagogic
grammar” method is returning)
• Promotes concept of learning about language – learner
is made aware of need to engage in a learning process
• Learner is given tasks which use language as data, but
which promote learning of language structures
• Language learners engage in linguistically motivated
activities, including corpus-based studies using
concordancers and other tools
Product vs process
• Product approaches are those that carefully
present specific aspects of the language for the
students, usually in terms of grammatical
metalanguage and “rules”
• Process approaches encourage creativity and
self-discovery by students as they experiment
with the language, often at the expense of
accuracy
• Few teachers nowadays take a wholly product-
or process-based approach
Data-driven learning
• Tries to marry product and process
approach by teaching things like grammar
through use of real text

G. Hadley http://www.nuis.ac.jp/~hadley/publication/windofchange/windsofchange.htm
Data-driven learning
• Research then theory
• Start with a question – may be provided by
teacher, or occur spontaneously
• Favourable use of materials – again may
be directed by teacher, or student may
explore at will
• Students have to work out the “rule” (or
pattern) for themselves
3. Learner Corpora
• A tool in the study of language learning
and hence language teaching
• studies of SLA (second language
acquisition) interested in
– how learners learn
– evidence from learners’ errors
– how this can feed in to ideas about how to
teach
Interlanguage
• Much work done on the role of L1
interference in language learning
– assumption that elements of learner’s L1
interfere with L2 language acquisition at all
levels (phonology, lexis, grammar of course,
but also more subtly, even as learners
become inetrmediate or advanced)
• Studies of language produced by
language learners can throw light on this
Learner corpora
• Corpus of texts produced (usually written)
by language learners
• Notably: International Corpus of Learner
English (ICLE), Louvain University
• Collections are corpora in the true sense
in that they are often planned, purposeful,
etc, but above all …
– ANNOTATED
Annotation
• Annotation can include the usual kind of
thing (POS tags etc)
• But of more interest is the annotation of
errors
– identifying that something is “wrong”
– suggesting what the correct version should be
– classification of error types
Error typing
• Very difficult task
– multiple errors can be compounded
– often easy to say there’s an error, but which error is it,
eg The boys runs
• Error classification can be contentious
• Even saying something is wrong can be
debatable
• Grammatical errors more or less straightforward
• Meaning errors difficult to spot
• Even more difficult: annotating matters of style,
nuance, etc.
Use of learner corpora
• Research over- or underuse of particular
constructuions or word(group)s
• Identify lexical errors to help in compilation
of learners’ dictionaries
• Identification of generic L2 errors vs L1-
influenced errors

S Granger (ed) Learner English on Computer, London (1998): Longman


S Granger, J Hung & S Petch-Tyson (eds) Computer Learner Corpora, Second
Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching, Amsterdam (2002):
John Benjamins
Corpora in teaching and learning
• Investigate variation in the verb form used
with collective nouns: aristocracy, army,
audience, cast, committee, community,
company, council,
[ crew, data, family,
government, group, jury, media, navy,
nobility, opposition, press, public, staff,
team.
Corpora in teaching and learning
• Conventional collective noun phrases. Using
the BNC, complete the following:
• Words: bouquet, brood, bunch, bundle,
chain, clump, cluster, colony, covey, drove,
flight, flock, gang, gaggle, group, heap, herd,
litter, nest, pack, pair, pile, range, series,
shoal, school, suit, swarm.
Countable v. Uncountable nouns
Definite v. Zero Article
• Definite v. Zero Article
• There are in English a number of
countable/uncountable pairs of words. Study
the words: language, society, literature try
to work out the difference in meaning
between the noun as countable and as
uncountable.
Corpora in teaching and learning
• Phrasal Verbs
• Using the data from the BNC choose a group of phrasal verbs:
 back away/down/off/out/up
 break away/down/in/into/off/out/through/up/with
 put
about/across/around/away/down/forward/off/on/out/throug
h/together/up
 set about/apart/aside/back/down/forth/in/off/on/to/up
 step aside/back/down/in/on/up/
Corpora in teaching and learning

• Prepositions
• Study the concordances of above and over
and work out the similarities and differences
between them.
Collocations

• First used by Firth (1957).


• “Collocations of a given word are statements
of the habitual or customary places of that
word” (Firth 1968: 181).
• Quantitative approach to collocations.
Collocations
• “Collocations are not absolute or deterministic, but are
probabilistic events, resulting from repeated combinations used
and encountered by the speakers of any language” (O’Keefe et al.
2007: 59).
• Sinclair (1991) argues that there are two fundamental principles at
work in the creation of meaning: the ‘idiom principle’ and the
‘open choice principle’.
• Collocates of ‘house’?
• Collocates of 'Boost'?
• Turn, Come, Go (What collocates with them?)
• Affixes with 'like'?
• 'that-clause' vs 'to-clause'
• What word could go into all 9 gaps?
• ? + fees
• ? + framework
• ? + proceedings
• ? + rights
• ? + profession
• ? + services
• ? + system
• ? + advice
• ? + action
Idiomaticity
• Different terminology: ‘lexical phrases’
(Nattinger and DeCarrico 1992), ‘prefabricated
patterns’ (Hakuta 1974), ‘routine formulae’
(Coulmas 1979), ‘formulaic sequences’ (Wray
2002; Schmitt 2004), ‘lexicalized stems’ (Pawley
and Syder 1983), ‘chunks’ (De Cock 2000) as
well as the more conventionally understood
labels such as ‘(restricted) collocations’, ‘fixed
expressions’, multi-word units/ expressions’,
‘idioms’ etc.
Idioms
• “Strings of more than one word whose
syntactic, lexical and phonological form is to
a greater or lesser degree fixed and whose
semantics and pragmatic functions are
opaque and specialised, also to a greater or
lesser degree” (O’Keefe 2007: 80).
• ‘Idiom-prone’ words: body parts, money,
light, colour and other basic notions.
Idioms
• ‘Paradox’ of idiomaticity: the very thing which for
native speakers promotes ease of processing and
fluent production seems to present non-native users
with an insurmountable obstacle.
• Idioms are difficult to get right.
• Idioms can sound strange on the lips of non-native
users.
• Idioms do not just ‘pop up’ in native speech; rather
they occur as part of a more extended phenomenon
that generates subtle webs of semantic, pragmatic and
discourse prosodies.
Lexical difficulties
Use the BNC to study the differences between the following pairs of words:
• Adverse, averse • Complement, compliment • Elicit, illicit
• Acute, chronic • Continual, continuous • Fewer, less
• Among, amid • Convince, persuade • Flammable, inflammable
• Amoral, immoral • Creole, pidgin • Ingenious, ingenuous
• Between, among • Definite, definitive • Lay, lie
• Biannual, biennial, • Different from, to, than
• Bimonthly, biweekly • Disinterested,
• Broach, brooch uninterested
• Cement, concrete • Disposal, disposition
• Cession, session • Distinct, distinctive
• Compare to, compare • Each other, one another
with • Economic, economical
Synonyms
Use the BNC to study the following:
• Great, Large, Big • Contrary, converse,
• Ambivalent, ambiguous opposite, reverse
• Abdicate, abrogate, • Empathy, sympathy,
abjure, adjure, arrogate, compassion, pity,
derogate commiseration
• Allay, alleviate, assuage,
relieve
• Arbitrate, mediate
• Assume, presume
• Avenge, revenge
• Barbaric, barbarous
• Between, among
• Born, borne

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