c orpus -i nformed t eaching and r esearch ii ken lau
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GOING FROM PRESCRIPTIVE TO DESCRIPTIVE
Prescriptive grammar has their origins in 18th and 19th
century Europe where grammar was connected to the
idea that there was a relationship between ‘orderliness’
in speech and writing. Prescriptive grammar is often
concerned with what is ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ – with
“standard language” and dictionaries that record correct
spelling and setting down precise meanings – all part of
unifying emerging nation-states. We can see a similar
tendency in China over the past 150 years, and Mandarin
and Modern Standard Chinese acquired normative status
as a national standard.
GOING FROM PRESCRIPTIVE TO DESCRIPTIVE
Many of the prescriptive rules of English that cause
us most trouble today come from this period (e.g. Who
did you speak to? or To whom did you speak?) and
were based upon analogies with Latin rather than
what English speakers actually said or wrote at the
time.
Who did you speak to? To whom did you
speak?
GOING FROM PRESCRIPTIVE TO DESCRIPTIVE Descriptive grammar has their origin in 20th-century
linguistics and other disciplines that began to see language as a vital resource for studying all kinds of aspects of social and cultural life. Descriptive grammar grew out of a concern with the language forms people actually used. In some part, this approach was an anthropological one, as different language groups were studied in relation to European languages, but also in part as a wave of American missionaries set about translating the bible into languages that had no written language. The techniques of inducing grammatical rules from spoken data were learnt, but so also was a respect for the variability of language as a system for reflecting thought and relationships.
GOING FROM PRESCRIPTIVE TO DESCRIPTIVE
Out of this work grew the idea of
‘acceptability’ (for communication to succeed)
rather than simply a concern for formal
‘correctness’. From a descriptive point of view,
Who did you speak to? and To whom did you
speak? are both acceptable sentences because
both are used and both make sense. But To
speak whom? did you is not acceptable because
it is neither used, nor does it make sense.
GOING FROM DEDUCTIVE TO INDUCTIVE
The term ‘data-driven learning’ suggests that it is an inductive approach and therefore comparable with the implicit method, though the emphasis is on gaining insight rather than establishing habits, and in this sense it is mentalistic.
The approach makes high demands on the students in terms of language proficiency, observation and inductive reasoning. It is therefore more suitable for advanced language learners.
REALITY OR NOT?
Indeed corpora provide authentic use of
language. However, one question that people
ask is whether corpora really capture reality?
However large a corpus is, it is still not
enough to capture all instances of language
use of adult user’s experience
REALITY OR NOT?- TESTING CLAIMS BASED ON INTUITION
RealPositive Connotation?
‘real English’, ‘the real country taste’
100-Million word BNC‘real world’, ‘real life/lives’, ‘real term(s)’, ‘real problem(s)’
Positive?
REALITY OF NOT?- CLARIFYING MOTIVES FOR TEACHING
Carter discusses a number of spoken
formulae which carry ‘cultural content,
including expressions referring to other
nations:
‘Dutch courage’, ‘to go Dutch’, ‘double-
Dutch’, ‘Dutch cap’
Very low frequencies – are these worth
teaching?
REALITY OF NOT?- CLARIFYING MOTIVES FOR TEACHING
Carter suggests two such reasons: ‘double-Dutch’, ‘go
Dutch’ and indeed, ‘Dutch cap’, could all be useful
expressions for a learner wishing to avoid social
embarrassment in Britain; and the study of British
insularity, as revealed through linguistic references to
foreign nationals and nations, could constitute a
stimulating activity which could increase learners’
awareness of cultural issues.
REALITY OF NOT?- CLARIFYING MOTIVES FOR TEACHING
The inclusion in syllabuses of language which is very rare in large corpora thus calls for justification, and the same is equally true for the exclusion of language which is common. As we saw with ‘real’, corpora can remind us of frequent uses which might otherwise tend to be ignored. Thus McCarthy and Carter (1995) notice the frequency in speech of the semi-modal ‘tend to’ (it occurs almost as often as ‘ought’ in the BNC spoken component). Although this verb has traditionally received little attention in teaching, it arguably provides learners with a valid alternative to frequency adverbs such as ‘usually’ and ‘often’.
CORPUS-BASED ENGLISH FOR GENERAL ACADEMIC PURPOSES (EGAP) MATERIALS
A key endeavor in the production of corpus-
based materials to aid students with
academic writing of a general nature is that
by Thusturn and Candlin (1998a, b). Moving
from controlled to a more open-ended
writing activities would seem to be
inculcating in students the kind of ‘corpus
competence’
CORPUS-BASED ENGLISH FOR GENERAL ACADEMIC PURPOSES (EGAP) MATERIALS
In this corpus-derived material the lexico-grammar is introduced according to its specific rhetorical function, e.g. referring to the literature, reporting the research of others. Within each broad function, each keyword (e.g. argue, suggest) is then examined within the following chain of activities:
LOOK at concordances for the key term and words surrounding it, thinking of meaning (using for instance, BAWE)
FAMILIARIZE yourself with the patterns of language surrounding the key term by referring to the concordances as you complete the tasks.
PRACTISE key terms without referring to the concordances. CREATE your own piece of writing using the terms studied to fulfill a
particular function of academic writing
(Thurstun and Candlin, 1998)
An example of corpus analysis:Hong Kong students overuse ‘I’ in cognitive activities with affective attachment but ‘under-argue (Ho, 2012)
HK_CORPper 1k words
UK_CORPper 1k words
Compared to UK_CORP LL p
I + 42 verbs* 3.27 0.42 Overused 653 <0.0001I + 12 C verbs 2.03 0.27 Overused 395 <0.0001I + 20 D verbs 1.18 0.08 Overused 311 <0.0001
4 main verbs I argue 0.01 0.03 x 2.5 >0.05I suggest 0.18 0.01 Overused 52.9 <0.0001I believe 0.42 0.10 Overused 55.3 <0.0001I think 1.37 0.11 Overused 335 <0.0001
argue (total) 0.31 0.85 Underused 55 <0.0001suggest (total) 1.06 1.12 x 0.4 >0.05believe (total) 1.53 0.83 Overused 55 <0.0001think (total) 3.22 0.77 Overused 404 <0.0001
Notables: I agree 0.96 0.02 Overused 336 <0.0001I hope 0.11 0.00 Overused 45 <0.0001I am surprised** 0.20 0.00 Overused 81 <0.0001
CORPUS-BASED ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC ACADEMIC PURPOSES (ESAP) MATERIALS
A variety of specialized corpora, consisting of
lectures, engineering textbooks, legal essays
and research articles, have been used for
various types of pedagogic applications,
which very often combine initial pen-and-
paper awareness-raising activities with
follow-up direct consultation of the corpus by
students.
CORPUS-BASED ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC ACADEMIC PURPOSES (ESAP) MATERIALS
Jones and Schmitt (2010) devised discipline-specific vocabulary materials including both technical and colloquial terms, derived from corpora of academic seminars on language and gender, international law and entrepreneurship. Mudraya’s (2006) materials, based on a 2-million-word corpus of engineering textbooks, also targeted vocabulary, but of a sub-technical nature. Mudraya has noted that this type of vocabulary (i.e. those items such as current, solution, tension which have some sense in general English, but are used in a different sense in technical English.
CORPUS-BASED ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC ACADEMIC PURPOSES (ESAP) MATERIALS
She proposes a set of queries based around solution on the grounds that this word occurs, in its general sense, both as high frequency word family and as a frequent sub-technical item. Students are presented with concordance output of carefully selected examples of solution and in one exercise are asked to identify, for example, the following: those adjectives used with solution (1) in the general sense and (2) in the technical (chemical) sense, and then asked to underline those adjectives that can be used with both senses of solution a means to highlight collocational sensitivities.
CORPUS-BASED ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC ACADEMIC PURPOSES (ESAP) MATERIALS
Task: Use the BNC corpus to compare the
pre-modifiers of solution in the Magazine
and Academic corpora.
CORPUS-BASED ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC ACADEMIC PURPOSES (ESAP) MATERIALS
At HKU, a legal concordancer was created by
the Centre for Applied English Studies of HKU
http://www4.caes.hku.hk/lawvocab/tools/inde
x.htm
to help Law students improve the legal
writing skills. One task that students have to
do as part of the course Writing Solutions to
Legal Problem is to have each student
present the usage of a legal term of his/her
choice by analyzing the concordancing lines.
CORPUS-BASED ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC ACADEMIC PURPOSES (ESAP) MATERIALS
Several pedagogic applications approach the corpus consultation from a genre-based perspective. Bhatia et al. propose various move-specific concordancing activities for one genre of legal English, the problem-question genre written by students within academic settings. They note that deductive reasoning plays a major role in this highly specialized genre. One of the major foci, therefore, is to have students examine various types of non-lexical epistemic and pragmatic/discoursal hedges for the role they play in the deductive reasoning.
CORPUS-BASED ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC ACADEMIC PURPOSES (ESAP) MATERIALS
Another advocate of a concordance- and genre-based approach to academic essay writing in the legal field, specifically formal legal essays written by undergraduates, is Weber (2001). First, Weber’s students were inducted into the genre of legal essays b reading through whole essays taken from the University of London LLB Examinations written by native speakers, and identifying some of the prototypical rhetorical features, e.g. identifying and/or delimiting the legal principle involved in the case. They were then asked to identify any lexical expressions which seemed to correlate with the genre features. This was followed up by consulting the corpus of the legal essays to verify and pinpoint regularities in lexico-grammatical expressions. Similar to those tasks proposed by Bhatia et. al., Weber also approaches the lexico-grammar from the perspective of a ‘local grammar’, which ‘attempts to describe the resources for only one set of meanings in a language rather than for the language as a whole’ (Hunston 2002: 90).
LEARNER CORPORA
So far we have only looked at expert corpora. We should bear in mind that corpora containing texts from learners have high pedagogical and research value. Mukherjee and Rohrbach (2006) advocated individualizing writing by having students build mini-corpora of their own writing, and localising the database. A pedagogic initiative in which students compare a learner corpus of NNS MBA dissertation writing with a corpus of published journal articles from the field of Business Studies, both compiled by the teacher, is that by Hewings and Hewings (2002).
LEARNER CORPORA
In spite of the potential advantages in
integrating learner corpus data into pedagogy,
Nesselhauf (2003) points out that care is
needed in presenting learner corpus data to
students, as does Mukherjee (2009: 213): ‘It is
neither desirable or useful to establish a rigid
dichotomy between good and correct usage in
nature data on the one hand and bad an
incorrect usage in learner output on the other’
BILINGUAL CORPORA
In this short course, we have never touched upon bilingual corpora but their value to translation and language teaching and learning should not be underestimated. Both Teubert (2004) and Barlow (2000) emphasise that parallel corpora are especially useful for examining phraseological queries, with Barlow noting that frequency counts provide ‘a very good indication of the preferred structure in each language’. Frankenberg-Garcia (2005) shows the value of using concordancing output from a parallel corpus in preference to a bilingual dictionary as students can see the different contexts in which a word is used.
CORPORA IN TEACHER EDUCATION
In teacher education programmes which do include a component on the use of corpora in pedagogy, some insightful observations have been made regarding the following three aspects:Teaching about corpora (technological
awareness of what a corpus and concordancing are)
Teaching through corpora (pedagogic awareness from analyzing corpus samples)
Teaching with corpora (linguistic awareness)
TEACHING ABOUT CORPORA
Key notions to be covered here would include the
different types of corpora available (spoken,
written, multimodal, etc.), corpus design, size and
representativeness. Teachers need to know how to
choose among different types of corpora for particular
queries. Teachers would also be introduced to
concordancing, a key analytical tool for corpus
queries. Teachers need to know how to formulate
different kinds of queries through specifying
searches to the left and right of the node word
and how to sort the concordance lines
alphabetically.
TEACHING ABOUT CORPORA
Many other researchers point out that teachers’ IT
competence, or lack thereof, and preference for more
traditional resources are not to be taken lightly and
that technological awareness is a key component of
developing teachers’ corpus competence.
TEACHING THROUGH CORPORA
A necessary prerequisite for expert teaching is pedagogical
content knowledge consisting of content knowledge (i.e.
linguistic knowledge in the case of EFL teaching), pedagogic
knowledge, and content specific teaching knowledge.
TEACHING THROUGH CORPORA
Pedagogic and content-specific teaching knowledge have both been
addressed in corpus-based modules on teacher education
programmes.
O’Keeffe and Farr (2003) outline a series of tasks for raising
students’ awareness of pedagogic knowledge through analysis of
corpus classroom data. It is of interest to note that they combine
this aspect with raising teachers’ technological awareness and
also content knowledge of discourse analysis by building hints on
searching into the instructions, and by asking teachers to analyse
the concordance output based on the classroom discourse model.
They also point out that the corpus data chosen was from both
expert and non-expert teachers to avoid equating inexperience with
lack of expertise or vice versa.
TEACHING THROUGH CORPORA
Another initiative which aims to raise trainee
teachers’ awareness through investigation of
the function of discourse markers used in
classroom teaching.
TEACHING WITH CORPORA
Teaching with corpora to raise teachers’
linguistic awareness was first introduced in
teacher education programmes in the mid
1990s, together with training in using
corpora. These studies emphasise the
benefits of corpus-based enquiries to focus
on phraseological patterns or semantic
information which may not be found in
grammar books and dictionaries.
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