Reading Prompt #9 (March 25th)
Barbierie, F. (2005). What is Corpus Linguistics?
Conrad, S. (2000). Will Corpus Linguistics Revolutionize Grammar Teaching in the 21st Century? TESOL Quarterly, 34(3), 548-560.
What is Corpus Linguistics? And why are some language teachers so excited about it? What applications can you envision for your current or future classroom?
I think what I understand from Conrad’s “integration of grammar and vocabulary” is that, instead of teaching students what may or may not be grammatically possible (correct or incorrect), it may be much more effective to focus their learning on those lexical and grammatical combinations that have been shown (by corpus linguistics) to be preferable (more natural) to native speakers.
I like the idea that corpus-influenced teaching materials can help streamline the teaching of certain language features, giving students the boiled-down essentials of the high-frequency grammatical patterns that will be the most useful to them in everyday situations.
As far as classroom applications of corpus linguistics-based research, I agree with Conrad that probably the greatest impact will be on making teaching materials more practical and effective.
As for which applications I can see for my own teaching, I think that teachers should take advantage of current corpus-linguistic research to help them use existing materials more effectively.
Also, as more and more classrooms have internet access, it has become fast and easy to check concordances when questions arise regarding particular grammar patterns, collocations, etc.
One thing I would like to know more about is the details of exactly how corpora are assembled, how choices are made on which sources to include (or exclude), and how those choices influence the analyses people make based on these corpora. For example, are sources from ALL users of English (native/ non-native/ all of the various Englishes) going into the same corpus? How does that influence the analyses that are based on that corpora?
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Good questions at the end of your post. You'll find many different kinds of corpora collected for different purposes. One a source is selected, everything within that source (within a given time period) is added. Some sources focus on standard written English from newspapers and other formal print media, some focus on spoken English in settings where it is spoken by native speakers. There are learner corpora collected from students (writen or spoken).
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