Using Corpora in the Language Classroom

Abstract

In a not so distant past, a teacher of English as a foreign or second language would often start a lesson by getting the students to look at a picture and read a text along the following lines: This is a man. He is John Brown; he is Mr Brown. He is sitting in a chair. This is a woman. She is Mary Brown; she is Mrs Brown. She is standing by a table. Mr Brown has a book. The book is in his hand; he has a book in his hand. Mrs Brown has a bag … (Widdowson 2003: 120) For many years, EFL/ESL teachers were provided by writers of classroom materials with invented texts that served only to demonstrate a range of grammatical structures. That is teachers and their students dealt with language that was very different from that used in real life: real-life language has a pragmatic purpose and is not created to be a ‘display of encodings’ (ibid.). One may wonder how learners were supposed to become effective communicators if such texts constituted their only linguistic diet.