Class 3

Corpora in language teaching

Current trends in FLT

Communicative Language Teaching Trends within CLT

authentic language contextualised language focus on form learner independence/autonomy language awareness

Corpora in FLT

application 1 - a tool for teachers application 2 - a tool for learners

Application 1

More accurate description of language frequency of words and grammatical features meanings of words extended units of meaning – phraseology collocations

Identifying problematic areas for L2 learners (learner corpora)

Syllabus design (especially ESP courses) Production of teaching materials

authentic examples learners’ dictionaries

More accurate description of language

Information on word frequency in dictionaries

example from Collins COBUILD Dictionary

frequent word

infrequent word

More accurate description of language

Arrangment order of word meaningsexamples from Oxford and Longman Dictionaries

OALD 1974

core meaning first

LDCE 2003

Look at the next slide. Notice which meaning is listed as the first one. Why?

The Academic Wordlist

Here is a corpus-based list of words that are particularly frequent in academic English, irrespective of the discipline

http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/academic/

Identification of problematic areas

This/that/these/those The following slide shows how frequently

determiners are used by two groups of Polish upper-intermediate (Comp2) and advanced (Comp4) learners of English as well as native-speaking expert writers – journalists (BNCWA).

Can you see any problems in the use of determiners by Polish learners of English?

The following two slides illustrate possible post-modification patterns of the determiner those.

Study the table. Can you see any differences in the post-modification patterns between Polsih learners of English and native expert writers?

Application 2

Data-driven learning (Tim Johns, University of Birmingham)students consult a corpus discovery learning increases motivation and interest the results are more lasting

DDL

Option A the teacher sets the task and asks

students to consult pre-selected citations unedited concordance lines

the teacher is more in control and knows what students will find

Option A

Presentation stage looking for examples for a particular

word/phrase/structure in a corpus studying concordance lines to look for

different meanings, collocations, colligations or translations (in the case of parallel corpora)

Practice stage finding missing words in concordance lines

DDL Option B

the student (together with the teacher) looks for an answer to a particular problem that has arisen from the student’s language use

more open-ended and unpredictable

Tim Johns’ Kibbitzershttp://lexically.net/TimJohns/index.html

MICASE Kibbitzershttp://micase.elicorpora.info/researchers/micase-kibbitzers