Raising teachers' awareness of corpora

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.

Applying corpus linguistics to pedagogy

“…Learner corpora, it is argued, are also of value here. However, the above can only be accomplished with strategy training, not only of students but also of teachers, as called for by Frankenberg-Garcia (2006). There is therefore still much to debate and develop in the application of corpus linguistics to pedagogy, a field first founded with the pioneering work of Tim Johns (1991aJohns ( , 1991b in the early nineties.…”

“…It is generally acknowledged that exploitation of corpus linguistics findings takes time to percolate through to pedagogic applications (Braun 2005;Frankenberg-Garcia 2006). Interestingly, it is in the area of English for Specific Purposes where corpora are now taking on an increasingly mainstream role (Belcher 2006;Flowerdew, forthcoming b) with the compilation of small "localised" corpora often compiled by the class tutor, or sometimes the students (Flowerdew 2004).…”

Corpora and Language Education

“…As corpus output is very different from the polished materials normally used in the classroom, teachers may need to be taught how to decode the results of their corpus searches. ( Frankenberg-Garcia 2010) on searching into the instructions, and by asking teachers to analyse the concordance output in terms of Sinclair and Coulthard's (1975) model of classroom discourse. They also point out that the corpus data chosen was from both expert and non-expert teachers (instead of experienced versus inexperienced teachers) to avoid equating inexperience with lack of expertise and vice versa.…”

Revisiting corpus creation and analysis tools for translation tasks

“…If we consider that the steepness of this learning curve is not only related to software use, but has also to do with grasping the basics of corpus exploration (Frankenberg-Garcia, 2012) and the high level of analytical skill and attention to detail needed (Braun, 2007), a first contribution towards facilitating corpus consultation, and consequently the acceptance of this methodology, could be to provide translators with a tool which is easy to use and makes the info mining tasks more straightforward.…”