What Corpora Can Offer in Language Teaching and Learning

Abstract

The corpus-based approach to linguistics and language education has gained prominence over the past four decades, particularly since the mid-1980s. This is because corpus analysis can be illuminating “in virtually all branches of linguistics or language learning” (Leech, 1997, p. 9; cf. also Biber, Conrad & Reppen, 1998, p. 11). One of the strengths of corpus data lies in its empirical nature, which pools together the intuitions of a great number of speakers and makes linguistic analysis more objective (McEnery & Wilson, 2001, p. 103). Unsurprisingly, corpora have been used extensively in nearly all branches of linguistics including, for example, lexicographic and lexical studies, grammatical studies, language variation studies, contrastive and translation studies, diachronic studies, semantics, pragmatics, stylistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics and language pedagogy. Corpora have passed into general usage in linguistics in spite of the fact that they still occasionally attract hostile criticism (e.g. Widdowson, 1990, 2000). The early 1990s saw an increasing interest in applying the findings of corpus-based research to language pedagogy. The upsurge of interest is evidenced by the eight well-received biennial international conferences on Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC) held in Lancaster, Oxford, Graz, Bertinoro, Granada, Paris and Lisbon. This is also apparent when one looks at the published literature. In addition to a large number of journal articles, at least twenty-five authored or edited volumes have recently been produced on the topic of teaching and language corpora: Wichmann, Fligelstone, McEnery and Knowles (1997), Partington (1998), Bernardini (2000), Burnard and McEnery (2000), Kettemann and Marko (2002, 2006), Aston (2001), Ghadessy, Henry and Roseberry (2001), Hunston (2002), Granger, Hung and Petch-Tyson (2002), Connor and Upton (2002), Tan (2002), Sinclair (2003, 2004), Aston, Bernardini and Stewart (2004), Mishan (2005), Nesselhauf (2005), Romer (2005), Braun, Kohn and Mukherjee (2006), Gavioli (2006), Scott and Tribble (2006), Hidalgo, Quereda and Santana (2007), O’Keeffe, McCarthy and Carter (2007), Aijmer (2009) and Campoy, Gea-valor and Belles-Fortuno (2010). These works cover a wide range of issues related to using corpora in language pedagogy, e.g. corpus-based language descriptions, corpus analysis in the classroom and learner corpus research (cf. Keck, 2004). In the opening chapter of Teaching and Language Corpora (Wichmann et al., 1997), Leech (1997) observed that a convergence between teaching and language corpora was apparent. That