Class 3

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Class 3

• Corpora in language teaching

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Current trends in FLT

• Communicative Language Teaching
• Trends within CLT
• authentic language
• contextualised language
• focus on form
• learner independence/autonomy
• language awareness

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Corpora in FLT

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

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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

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More accurate description of language

• Information on word frequency in dictionaries
• example from Collins COBUILD Dictionary

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frequent word
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infrequent word
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More accurate description of language

• Arrangment order of word meanings
• examples from Oxford and Longman Dictionaries

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OALD 1974
core meaning first
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LDCE 2003

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

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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/academ
  ic/

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Identification of problematic areas
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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?

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• 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?

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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

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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

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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

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DDL

• Option B
• the student (together with the teacher) looks for
  an answer to a particular problem that has arisen
  from the students language use
• more open-ended and unpredictable
• Tim Johns Kibbitzershttp//lexically.net/TimJohn
  s/index.html
• MICASE Kibbitzershttp//micase.elicorpora.info/re
  searchers/micase-kibbitzers