Creating And Using English Language Corpora

Explains and illustrates how teachers can use corpora to create classroom materials and activities to address specific class needs. Using Corpora in the Language Classroom shows teachers how to use corpora and corpus tools to expand student learning. Together with its companion website, this teacher-friendly book demystifies corpus linguistics with clear explanations, instructions and examples. It provides the essential knowledge, tools, and skills teachers need to enable students to discover how language is really used. Clear and concise, this volume provides: -An overview of corpus linguistics -Clear explanations of terminology -Tasks and activities that invite readers to interact with the material -Principled instructions for creating classroom materials and activities, including how to create corpora to address specific class needs.

After decades of being overlooked, corpus evidence is becoming an important component of the teaching and learning of languages. Above all, the profession needs guidance in the practicalities of using corpora, interpreting the results and applying them to the problems and opportunities of the classroom. This book is intensely practical, written mainly by a new generation of language teachers who are acknowledged experts in central aspects of the discipline. It offers advice on what to do in the classroom, how to cope with teachers' queries about language, what corpora to use including learner corpora and spoken corpora and how to handle the variability of language; it reports on some current research and explains how the access software is constructed, including an opportunity for the practitioner to write small but useful programs; and it takes a look into the future of corpora in language teaching.

Corpora are well-established as a resource for language research; they are now also increasingly being used for teaching purposes. This book is the first of its kind to deal explicitly and in a wide-ranging way with the use of corpora in teaching. It contains an extensive collection of articles by corpus linguists and practising teachers, covering not only the use of data to inform and create teaching materials but also the direct exploitation of corpora by students, both in the study of linguistics in general and in the acquisition of proficiency in individual languages, including English, Welsh, German, French and Italian. In addition, the book offers practical information on the sources of corpora and concordances, including those suitable for work on non-roman scripts such as Greek and Cyrillic.

A range of electronic corpora is increasingly accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This development coincided with improved standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. This book looks at developing similar standards for enriching and preserving unconventional data: dialects, child language and bilingual databases.

Even before the Helsinki Corpus was published, Spain had a good amount of Historical English researchers, such as the group directed by Teresa Fanego in Santiago de Compostela. In the last couple of decades, the number of scholars working in the field of Historical Corpus Linguistics has increased, and, nowadays, there are some interesting projects in Spain that will result in the publication of valuable material for scholars throughout the world. The aim of this volume is twofold. On the on...