Corpus, Concordancing and Teacher Education

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2009

This article reviews and discusses four somewhat contentious issues in the application of corpus linguistics to pedagogy, ESP in particular. Corpus linguistic techniques have been criticized on the grounds that they encourage a more bottom-up rather than top-down processing of text in which concordance lines are examined atomistically. One criticism levelled against corpus data is that a corpus presents language out of its original context. For this reason, some corpus linguists have underscored the importance of 'pedagogic mediation' to contextualize the data for the students' own writing environment. Concerns relating to the inductive approach associated with corpus-based pedagogy have also been raised as this approach may not always be the most appropriate one. A final consideration relates to the issue of whether a corpus is always the most appropriate resource to use among the wealth of other resources available.

The development of corpora and corpus linguistics over the last 50 years or so has improved the description and understanding of language and has had important implications for language teaching and learning.

Language Awareness, 2008

A recent practice in the study of language on teacher education programmes has been the use of electronic corpora, and we are therefore still at the initial stages of explor- ing key issues relating to their integration. Despite arguments for and against their adaptation, there is a dearth of evaluative research examining student teachers’ per- ceptions of learning and teaching through corpus-based activities. This paper has two main foci. Firstly, it reports some of the ways in which corpora have been incorpo- rated into a language systemsmodule on anMA in English Language Teaching (ELT) programme over a two-year period. More significantly, it outlines the findings from survey results, which uncover student teachers’ perspectives on their experiences of using corpora.Additionally, it explores the potentials and problems foreseen by these practitioners in relation to using such an approach in their careers. The investigation of these pertinent issues with a participant group of 25 student teachers (STs) leads to the conclusion that there is generally a positive predisposition towards the use of corpora. These attitudes vary in relation to the projected adaptation in EL teaching, and the results also show that the real teaching scenario often does not permit the ideal of full application.

CALL, 2020

The present study explores the attitudes of novice teachers towards corpus-aided language learning and teaching in an undergraduate writing course for multilingual students at a large US public university. The participating instructors facilitated approximately 75 minutes of corpus training for their students and implemented 4-6 corpus activities over the course of the 16-week term. Participating instructors completed an initial survey documenting existing knowledge of, experiences with, and attitudes towards corpus-aided language learning and teaching, a second open-ended questionnaire at the mid-point of the academic term exploring their experiences, and a final instrument assessing how their attitudes had potentially evolved, either positively or negatively, and their likelihood for continued implementation of corpus-aided pedagogy in their classrooms.To offer a balanced perspective, data was also collected from three teachers who chose not to implement corpus activities in their courses. Findings display generally positive attitudes towards corpus study but also reveal emergent tensions regarding the use of ready-made corpus activities and the key affordances of discovery, authenticity, and autonomy often forwarded in support of corpus pedagogy.

PROJECT (Professional Journal of English Education), 2022

Regarding the seemingly ignored corpus for pedagogical contexts, it is necessary to investigate how prospective English teachers perceive corpus and its use for language teaching. From the description of the perceptions, it is then possible to consider further pedagogical implementation. This study thus examines English Education Department students' perceptions of corpus use for English language teaching in the Indonesian context. There are 31 participants from the fifth-semester students of an English Education Department in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The perception data were collected through questionnaires and interviews after some practice of corpus use. The questionnaires and interviews show that most students perceived corpus positively and found corpus application for language teaching beneficial and essential, albeit unfamiliar with corpus. Due to ignorance, there are some difficulties faced by the students. However, this study shows the advantages of using corpus for teach...

This paper presents findings from experimental uses of corpora for language teaching in secondary school education in France. Working alongside two teachers of Spanish, we identified specific learning outcomes in pedagogical sequences and looked at how corpus use could be brought into their schemes of work with a view to facilitating the attainment of these. In each case, the teachers felt that their task had been made easier, insofar as the enquiry methods or techniques allowed them to carry out their work more efficiently. Such approaches to corpus use in language teaching are found to be compatible with the existing practices of ordinary language teachers. However, they do bring into question the idea of corpus work necessarily involving large, end-state electronic corpora.

20 Years of EUROCALL: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future, 2013

This paper investigates uses of corpora in language learning ('data-driven learning') through analysis of a 600K-word corpus of empirical research papers in the field. The corpus can tell us much -the authors and the countries the studies are conducted in, the types of publication, and so on. The corpus investigation itself starts with frequency lists of words and clusters to detect initial themes, which are then extended (via distribution plots, collocates, concordances, etc.) to look at specific items: the researchers cited, the theoretical constructs and concepts investigated and how they are treated, and so on. The paper ends by dividing the corpus into early and more recent papers to compare evolution over time. This reveals keywords that were prevalent in earlier days as a snapshot of the past, and keywords today which may give an idea of future directions.

2010

Using corpora in language classrooms has proven to be an effective tool in teaching vocabulary, grammar and language use to learners of English as a second/foreign language. However, many EFL teachers find integrating corpus-based activities in their classrooms a challenging teaching practice. Moreover, some teachers avoid using corpora because they think that designing corpus-based activities is a challenging task. In this paper, the researchers will guide the readers on how corpora can help students understand how certain language forms are used by native speakers of English. They will give a brief review on studies discussing the benefits and the challenges of using corpora in language learning. The role of the teacher is also highlighted in this paper. The researchers will then go through some corpus-based materials and activities suitable for different language levels. Activities will aim at developing students’ vocabulary, grammar, knowledge of idiomatic expressions and pragma...

Academia Letters, 2021

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex brain disorder characterized by impairments in some executive functions. Executive functions play an important role in individuals' daily life, due to the fact that they support social communication and interaction. This paper investigates which executive functions are impacted and how on people who suffer from ASD. In many cases, cognitive theories and research links autism to dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex and more specifically to impairments to "cool" components of EFs, such as inhibition and shifting, while damages to "hot" components of EFs are still not clearly defined. However, studies reveal that neurotransmitters like dopamine seem to have an impact on other brain areas that are involved in autism including the amygdala, cerebellum, and parietal lobe. Definition of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in some abilities of the executive functions, including social communication and interaction, as well as restricted interests and repetitive behaviors, across the lifespan (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Carotenuto et al., 2019; Demetriou, DeMayo & Guastella, 2019). A person can be diagnosed with ASD, at the age of 18 months, but often, most patients are not diagnosed until the age of 5 years (Casanova, 2014). Although once, ASD was considered a rare disorder, research shows that, during the last years, the male to female ratio is close to four to one (Demetriou, et al., 2019; Loomes, Hull & Mandy, 2017). That is the reason why, there is an increasing interest in understanding gender differences and