Abstract
English language corpora, containing the widest possible range of varieties of English, provide empirical date concerning language usage, helping to redefine the notion of ‘standard’ to which language learners should aspire. This paper takes as its theoretical framework an approach to corpus-aided discovery learning in which the central role of corpora is seen as that of providing rich sources of autonomous learning activities. Here, by investigating Chinese EFL learners’ use of the infinitive ‘to’ in the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), the suggestion is put forward that availability of different corpora and software tools and the ability to combine them in different ways may help learners develop an understanding of the patterned quality language and be conducive to more appropriate use, as learners are not just to observe patterns, but also to develop hypotheses as to their variability. Finally, a corpus-aided approach is proposed to provide insight into new perspectives to revolutionize EFL instruction.
Highlights
A corpus is a body of text or speech that provides a representative sample of a language
This paper takes as its theoretical framework an approach to corpus-aided discovery learning in which the central role of corpora is seen as that of providing rich sources of autonomous learning activities
By investigating Chinese EFL learners’ use of the infinitive ‘to’ in the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), the suggestion is put forward that availability of different corpora and software tools and the ability to combine them in different ways may help learners develop an understanding of the patterned quality language and be conducive to more appropriate use, as learners are not just to observe patterns, and to develop hypotheses as to their variability
Summary
A corpus is a body of text or speech that provides a representative sample of a language. The availability of large, online native corpora provides a straightforward tool for making a comparison. Such native corpora as the American National Corpus (ANC), Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) have plenty of examples of fictions, magazines, newspapers and academic writings that demonstrate the frequent patterns and changes in the spoken and written varieties of English. While the learner corpora are collections of authentic texts produced by non-native speakers such as the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) which consists of one million words of written compositions by 5 types of learners: senior middle-school, tertiary college English (band 4), tertiary college English (band 6), tertiary majors in English (1st and 2nd years), tertiary majors in English (3rd and 4th years) and is annotated with grammatical tags (automatically) and error tags (manually). Access has become fairly easy on standard small computers, user-friendly software is available for most normal tasks, websites are accumulating fast, and corpora are almost part of the pedagogical landscape (Sinclair, 2004)
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