Pedagogical Corpus Research Articles

Corpus Research Applications in Second Language Teaching

Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also had an impact on second language learning and teaching. In the field of applied linguistics, more and more researchers and practitioners treasure what corpus linguistics has to offer to language pedagogy. Still, corpora and corpus tools have yet to be widely implemented in pedagogical contexts. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of pedagogical corpus applications and to review recent publications in the area of corpus linguistics and language teaching. It covers indirect corpus applications, such as in syllabus or materials design, as well as direct applications of corpora in the second language classroom. The article aims to illustrate how both general and specialized language corpora can be used in these applications and discusses directions for future research in applied corpus linguistics.

Concordancing with students using an ‘off-the-Web’ corpus

Much has been published on the subject of the role of concordancing in foreign language teaching, most of itin the field of EFL. Of crucial importance is the corpus on which concordances are based. This article describes how a pedagogic corpus can be downloaded from the Web as well as its experimental exploitation with first and second year undergraduates.

Concordancers in the design and implementation of foreign language courses

More and more further and higher education courses have to be designed for learners who have no previous knowledge of the foreign language but who have specific academic and/or professional interests. This paper maintains that their motivation and specialized knowledge can be exploited if foreign language learning is integrated with the academic/professional curriculum. This interdisciplinary approach clashes with traditional categories of foreign language teaching—such as grading and selection of teaching materials—which seem to exclude major variations in the route of foreign language acquisition, particularly at early stages. It is argued that materials can be selected or designed on the basis of subject and genre related criteria to suit the academic/professional needs and interests of the learners. The resulting set of texts constitutes a small, pedagogical corpus, which is a subset of the discourse type(s) characterizing the discourse community to which the learners belong. The description of the texts obtained via the concordancer constitutes a corpus-specific grammar, which enables the teacher to focus learning activities on relevant linguistic forms and functions. The computer also produces a selected dictionary and a bank of authentic, contextualized examples. The result is a viable top-down approach to foreign language learning, which incorporates textual features of sectorial discourse types even in ab initio courses.

ESP — Superstructure and microlanguage

More and more further and higher education courses have to be designed for learners who have no previous knowledge of the foreign language but who have specific academic and/or professional interests. This paper maintains that their motivation and specialized knowledge can be exploited if foreign language learning is integrated with the academic/professional curriculum. This interdisciplinary approach clashes with traditional categories of foreign language teaching—such as grading and selection of teaching materials—which seem to exclude major variations in the route of foreign language acquisition, particularly at early stages. It is argued that materials can be selected or designed on the basis of subject and genre related criteria to suit the academic/professional needs and interests of the learners. The resulting set of texts constitutes a small, pedagogical corpus, which is a subset of the discourse type(s) characterizing the discourse community to which the learners belong. The description of the texts obtained via the concordancer constitutes a corpus-specific grammar, which enables the teacher to focus learning activities on relevant linguistic forms and functions. The computer also produces a selected dictionary and a bank of authentic, contextualized examples. The result is a viable top-down approach to foreign language learning, which incorporates textual features of sectorial discourse types even in ab initio courses.