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The Use of Digital Corpora in Foreign Language instruction

The Use of Digital Corpora in Foreign Language instruction. Recent Developments in Technological Tools for the Purpose of Facilitating SLA. What’s a Digital Corpus?. Def.: a collection or body of text/s

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The Use of Digital Corpora in Foreign Language instruction

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  1. The Use of Digital Corpora in Foreign Language instruction Recent Developments in Technological Tools for the Purpose of Facilitating SLA

  2. What’s a Digital Corpus? • Def.: a collection or body of text/s • …so a digital corpus is a body of text/s which is accessible and searchable using computer software. • What are the main functions of a corpus? • They allow us to understand more about a particular area of language via frequency counts, phraseology, and collocations. (Hunston, S. 2002) • Best known for… • Concordance lines, which indicate a word’s natural context

  3. Example of Concordance Lines GRASP: to take a firm hold or grip on something using one’s hands or a tool. (OED, 2000)

  4. Types of Corpora and Their Potential Uses • General Corpus: a very large body of texts which were selected from various genres. Also known as a reference corpus due to its function as a comparative measure for other corpora. • Learner Corpus: a collection of texts which are produced by learners of a language. Often a searchable cache of essays, the learner corpus allows instructors to locate patterns and differences in students’ use of language. • Specialized Corpus:Several texts from one specific genre (i.e. academic journal articles) for the purpose of understanding features unique to one specific area of communication. Great for ESP.

  5. Types of Corpora and Their Potential Uses Cont. • Pedagogic Corpus: a corpus which is made up of all language a student has been exposed to in a particular class or academic program. • Parallel Corpus:is a corpus of texts that have been translated from one language into another. (i.e. Novels translated from English to Japanese) Allows for investigation of linguistic differences between two or more languages. • Historical Corpus: is a body of texts usually from a similar genre that shows language change over a period of time.

  6. Some ideas for use in Second Language Acquisition • Concordance Lines: students study the actual contextual environments and collocations of key vocabulary terms. (increases noticing (Truscott, J. 1998)) • Frequency Counts: students research the historical rise and fall of certain culture-specific terms such as slang and idioms. (i.e. groovy) • Learner Comparison: teacher compiles essays from 101 and 107 and has students cross-research key grammatical and stylistic functions. (i.e. conjunction “and”)

  7. Accessible Corpora Available to YOU • MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) • Specialized corpus of spoken academic language • BNC (British National Corpus) • General 100 mil word collection of written English texts • Time Corpus • Historical corpus of Time magazine text from 1923 • OANC (Open American National Corpus) • Free, mini downloadable corpus of 14mil words • Accompanying software allows for search of own texts

  8. Refereneces • Gavioli, L. (1997). Exploring Texts through the Concordancer: Guiding the Learner. Teaching and Language Corpora, London: Longman, 83-99. • “Grasp” (2002). Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English. Retrieved October 11, 2011 from http://www.cambridge.org/elt/corpus/cancode.htm • Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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