An Introduction to Using Corpora with EFL Learners

Review of A guide to using corpora for English language learners, 2019

A guide to using corpora for English language learners Poole, R. 2019 ISBN: 978-1474427173 US $29.95 184 pp. Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh, UK As a rapidly expanding area of research, corpus linguistics has had far-reaching impacts in a number of areas ranging from forensic science to media studies (Hyland, Huat, & Handford, 2012). It has also entered the field of language education in the form of data-driven learning, revolutionizing the field in many aspects. Techniques developed for exploiting language corpora have shown that they have great potential to improve the language skills of learners. However, actual integration of corpora into language learning practices has remained limited. One account for this is the scarcity of handy, reliable, and detailed resources guiding language learners in the use of corpora (Leńko-Szymańska, 2017). The book titled A guide to using corpora for English language learners by Poole is, therefore, a timely arrival that addresses this scarcity, addressing many needs regarding how to effectively use corpora for teaching and learning English. The book consists of five chapters, each addressing a different aspect of language learning through corpora. The first chapter, Learning the essentials, is devoted to introducing the basic search functions of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the British National Corpus (BNC), and the Global Web-Based English Corpus. A significant and distinguishing feature of the book is that the author explains search techniques from scratch, making the book appropriate for those having no prior knowledge of corpus use. While introducing search tools one by one, the author also explains the terminology of corpus linguistics (e.g., frequency, concordance lines, collocation window, etc.) without overwhelming the readers with too many technical details. Additionally, the subsections in the first chapter include thought-provoking instructions regarding the use of corpora and shows the reader what type of language-related questions could be answered using corpora. The second chapter is titled Corpus searches for vocabulary learning. Vocabulary is, as the author acknowledges, the language domain for which corpus use is the commonest. The tone of the chapter, which could be described as informal, gives readers the impression that they are participating in a classroom training session rather than reading printed instructions. This intimate and reader-friendly language saves the book from being arid. A notable aspect of this chapter is that the author introduces search functions and shows readers ways of expanding their vocabulary in English. Although looking up a word with its meaning, synonyms, and collocations is the first function of the corpus tools that comes to mind, the author goes beyond this, providing readers with alternatives such as learning new words with shared roots and

2013

This paper aims at contextualizing and presenting the first volume of the journal Research in Corpus Linguistics and is, therefore, divided into two main parts. First of all, it provides an introduction to the field of corpus linguistics and its increasingly relevant role in language teaching and learning. Secondly, it briefly introduces and discusses the six articles of the volume. Stemming from oral presentations delivered at the 4th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC2012, Jaén, Spain), these articles have a number of features in common. They all make extensive use of corpora and at the same time deal with language teaching and language learning, the underlying assumption being that a genuine and mutually beneficial connection can be established between teaching and research. For this reason, each of them constitutes an illustrative sample of how different corpora can be exploited for different research purposes.

2010

Using corpora in language classrooms has proven to be an effective tool in teaching vocabulary, grammar and language use to learners of English as a second/foreign language. However, many EFL teachers find integrating corpus-based activities in their classrooms a challenging teaching practice. Moreover, some teachers avoid using corpora because they think that designing corpus-based activities is a challenging task. In this paper, the researchers will guide the readers on how corpora can help students understand how certain language forms are used by native speakers of English. They will give a brief review on studies discussing the benefits and the challenges of using corpora in language learning. The role of the teacher is also highlighted in this paper. The researchers will then go through some corpus-based materials and activities suitable for different language levels. Activities will aim at developing students’ vocabulary, grammar, knowledge of idiomatic expressions and pragma...

PASAA - A journal of language teaching and learning in Thailand (44), 2012

Learner corpora, or searchable collections of the written or spoken production of language learners, have become increasingly vital in the field of applied linguistics. As advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing have allowed for the automatic or semi-automatic parsing, tagging and coding of large chunks of learner-produced text, there is increasing interest in the analysis of large-scale corpora of many millions of words, collected from a broad range of linguistic tasks, language backgrounds, and learner proficiencies. As language teachers, we set our students a wide range of written and spoken tasks that, after completion, are forgotten about or deleted when the term ends. In doing so, the opportunity to compare and actually describe what your students can (and cannot) do linguistically in quantifiable terms is wasted, and a valuable resource for shaping future curricula, lesson planning and assessments is lost. This short ‘idea’ paper will outline some of the interesting work currently being undertaken by those working on learner corpora, how language educators can build their own learner corpora, and how the application of the findings from learner data can be used to build a detailed profile of the learners in your institution.

Recently, as a corpus, which has been mainly used for linguistic analysis, is emerging as an innovative tool in language learning, a growing body of research has paid attention to the efficacy of corpus use from educational perspectives. Given that corpus use for pedagogical purposes entails autonomous and independent learning of language learners, it is important to uncover how corpus users evaluate it based on their own experience. While most of the previous studies were conducted in the ESL settings, the present study sets out to examine postsecondary Korean students' opinions of general and specialized corpora with regard to their own English study and writing in the EFL setting. The questionnaires which twenty-eight students of two corpus workshops submitted were analyzed in terms of their evaluations of corpora as well as their prior writing experience, reference use, and attitudes towards English study and writing. The results show that the respondents, being dissatisfied with their English skills, were eager to increase their overall English skills and English writing skills. During English writing, they usually used two to three language references including bilingual dictionaries followed by monolingual dictionaries and Internet search engines. The results also prove that the respondents regarded corpora as helpful language references and that they would use them and recommend them to other students. The respondents, however, expressed disparate attitudes towards specialized corpora. In general, corpora were considered more appropriate to the intermediate and advanced levels of students in terms of language proficiency and academic experience. Using corpora for pedagogical purposes merits further research to validate its efficacy and investigate the possibility of its application in Korea.

International Journal of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics, 2020

Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also had an impact on second language learning and teaching. In the field of applied linguistics, more and more researchers and practitioners treasure what corpus linguistics has to offer to language pedagogy. Still, corpora and corpus tools have yet to be widely implemented in pedagogical contexts. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of pedagogical corpus applications and to review recent publications in the area of corpus linguistics and language teaching. It covers indirect corpus applications, such as in syllabus or materials design, as well as direct applications of corpora in the second language classroom. The article aims to illustrate how both general and specialized language corpora can be used in these applications and discusses directions for future research in applied corpus linguistics.

TESOL Quarterly, 2019

This paper contemplates how corpus evidence might be used to address teachers' questions about English grammar and suggests that corpus linguistics has an important role to play in raising their awareness to linguistic features and patterns. The article surveys a range of grammatical questions posted by EFL/ESL teachers on four Orkut communities devoted to the teaching and learning of English. It concentrates on three specific types of questions: synonymous lexical items which function differently and are reported to be difficult to teach and explain; linguistic evidence that contradicts the prescriptive grammar rules that teachers have been taught during their education; and collocations that teachers attempt to explicate. In attempting to address the teachers' questions, corpus evidence is used to offer possible explanations. It is suggested that the use of corpus data in addressing these questions is not only convincing but also leads to discoveries of patterns and meanings which might not be found in other reference materials such as grammars and dictionaries.

BELT: Brazilian English Language Teaching Journal , 2012

This paper discusses the impact language and learner corpora have had in English Language Teaching (ELT). Corpus Linguistics can be defined as the study of language through compilation of authentically produced texts which undergo automatic or semi-automatic analyses. Over the past decade Corpus Linguistics studies have been increasingly adopted in ELT, ranging from applications in teaching materials (O'Keeffe, McCarthy and Carter, 2007) to understanding how learners and non-native speakers use English (Granger, 2003, 1998). Language and learner corpora, both spoken and written, have shed light into how the English language is actually used around the world, and are consequently changing the way we teach English. In this paper we will show how such corpora are influencing ELT, in general, and more specifically in Brazil, as this is our research and teaching context.