Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T01:55:40.179Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Raising teachers' awareness of corpora

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2010

Ana Frankenberg-Garcia
Ana Frankenberg-Garcia*
Affiliation:
Instituto Superior de Línguas e Administração – Lisboaana.frankenberg@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The last couple of decades have seen a dramatic increase in corpus availability and a steady growth in the number of supporters of the use of corpora in language teaching. Yet there still seems to be a long way to go before corpora can be understood and used by language teachers in general. Novice corpus users often fail to grasp that corpora do not work in the same way as the more familiar language learning resources – such as dictionaries, grammar books and textbooks – that they are accustomed to using. I therefore propose a series of task-based, consciousness-raising exercises to help teachers (who are not corpus linguists) understand the basics of corpora. The tasks proposed are not about learning how to use a specific corpus or software, but about learning how to use corpora in general.

Type
Plenary Speeches
Information
Language Teaching , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , October 2012 , pp. 475 - 489
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aijmer, K. (ed.) (2009). Corpora and language teaching. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, W. & Corbett, J. (2009). Exploring English with online corpora. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aston, G. (ed.) (2001). Learning with corpora. Houston: Athelstan.Google Scholar
Aston, G., Bernardini, S. & Stewart, D. (eds.) (2004). Corpora and language learners. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennet, G. (2010). Using corpora in the language learning classroom: Corpus linguistics for teachers. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernardini, S. (2000). Systematising serendipity: Proposals for concordancing large corpora with language learners. In Burnard, L. & McEnery, T. (eds.) Rethinking language pedagogy from a corpus perspective. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 225–234.Google Scholar
Bianchi, F. & Manca, E. (2006). Discovering language through corpora: needed abilities and student difficulties in corpus analysis. Paper presented at the 7th Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora, Paris, 1–4 July 2006. www.openstarts.units.it/dspace/bitstream/10077/3193/1/04Bianchi_Manca.pdfGoogle Scholar
Boulton, A. (2009). Data-driven learning: reasonable fears and rational reassurance. Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics 35.1, 81–106.Google Scholar
Braun, S. (2005). From pedagogically relevant corpora to authentic language learning contents. ReCALL 17.1, 47–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breyer, Y. (2009). Learning and teaching with corpora: reflections by student teachers. Computer Assisted Language Learning 22.2, 153–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnard, L. & McEnery, T. (eds.) (2000). Rethinking language pedagogy from a corpus perspective. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Davies, M. (2004). BYU-BNC: The British National Corpus. http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc.Google Scholar
Davies, M. (2008). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 410+ million words, 1990–present. www.americancorpus.org.Google Scholar
Evert, S. (2010). The IMS Open Corpus Workbench (CWB) CQP Query Language Tutorial. http://cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/~korpora/ws/CWBdoc/CQP_Tutorial.Google Scholar
Frankenberg-Garcia, A. (2005). A peek into what today's language learners as researchers actually do. International Journal of Lexicography 18.3, 335–355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frankenberg-Garcia, A. (2010). Encouraging EFL teachers to use corpora in the classroom. Invited presentation at the BAAL and Cambridge University Press Seminar Using corpus evidence in the classroom: Working with teachers and learners. University of Birmingham, 24–25 June 2010.Google Scholar
Frankenberg-Garcia, A. & Santos, D. (2003). Introducing COMPARA: the Portuguese–English parallel corpus. In Zanettin, F., Bernardini, S. & Stewart, D. (eds.) Corpora in translator education. Manchester: St. Jerome, 71–87.Google Scholar
Frankenberg-Garcia, A., Flowerdew, L. & Aston, G. (eds.) (2011). New trends in corpora and language learning. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Gilquin, G. & Granger, S. (2010). How can DDL be used in language teaching? In O'Keeffe, A. & McCarthy, M. (eds.) The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics. London: Routledge, 359–370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hidalgo, E., Quereda, L. & Santana, J. (eds.) (2007). Corpora in the foreign language classroom. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johns, T. & King, P. (eds.) (1991). Classroom concordancing. Birmingham: The University of Birmingham Centre for English Language Studies.Google Scholar
Kaszubski, P. (2011). IFAConc – a pedagogic tool for online concordancing with EFL/EAP learners. In Frankenberg-Garcia, A. et al. (eds.), 81–104.Google Scholar
Kennedy, C. & Miceli, T. (2001). An evaluation of intermediate students’ approaches to corpus investigation. Language Learning & Technology 5.3, 77–90.Google Scholar
Kettemann, B. & Marko, G. (eds.) (2002). Teaching and learning by doing corpus analysis. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kübler, N. (ed.) (forthcoming). Corpora, language, teaching, and resources: From theory to practice. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, J. (2004). Bridging the gap between applied corpus linguistics and the reality of English language teaching in Germany. In Connor, U. & Upton, T. (eds.) Applied corpus linguistics: A multidimensional perspective. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 239–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mukherjee, J. (2006). Corpus linguistics and language pedagogy: the state of the art and beyond. In Braun, S., Khon, K. & Mukherjee, J. (eds.) Corpus technology and language pedagogy: New resources, new tools, new methods. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 5–24.Google Scholar
O'Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M. & Carter, R. (2007). From corpus to classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reppen, R. (2010). Using corpora in the language classroom. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Römer, U. (2006). Pedagogical applications of corpora: Some reflections on the current scope and a wish list for future developments. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54.2, 121–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Römer, U. (2009). Corpus research and practice: What help do teachers need and what can we offer? In Aijmer, K. (ed.) (2009), 83–98.Google Scholar
Santos, D. & Frankenberg-Garcia, A. (2007). The corpus, its users and their needs: A user-oriented evaluation of COMPARA. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12.3, 335–374.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinclair, J. (ed.) (2004). How to use corpora in language teaching. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Someya, Y. (2000). Online business letter corpus: KWIC concordancer and an experiment in data-driven learning/writing. Paper presented at the 3rd Association for Business Communication International Conference, Kyoto, 9 August 2000.Google Scholar
Thomas, J. (2002). A ten-step introduction to concordancing through the Collins Cobuild Corpus Concordance Sampler. http://web.quick.cz/jaedth/Introduction%20to%20CCS.htmGoogle Scholar
Tiedemann, J. (2009). News from OPUS – A Collection of Multilingual Parallel Corpora with Tools and Interfaces. In Nicolov, N., Bontcheva, K., Angelova, G. & Mitkov, R. (eds.) Recent advances in natural language processing. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, Volume V, 237–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tribble, C. (2001). Corpora and teaching: adjusting the gaze. Paper presented at the 22nd ICAME conference, Louvain, 16–20 May 2001.Google Scholar
Tribble, C. & Jones, G. (1997). Concordancing in the classroom: a resource guide for teachers. Houston: Athelstan.Google Scholar
Widmann, J., Kohn, K. & Ziai, R. (2011). The SACODEYL search tool – exploiting corpora for language learning purposes. In Frankenberg-Garcia, et al. (eds.), 167–178.Google Scholar