Using Corpora In The Language Classroom

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.

The goal of this book is to make the ideas of corpus linguistics accessible to teachers and, most important, provide ideas, instruction, and opportunities for teachers to use the applications of corpus linguistics in their classrooms. Using Corpora in the Language Learning Classroom is intended for graduate students who are studying applied linguistics or TESOL, for teacher-trainers working with language instructors, and for practicing language teachers who want to better understand corpus linguistics and how to incorporate it into their classroom. The book has three sections: (1) a general introduction to corpus linguistics, which contains a brief look at the theory and principles of corpus linguistics; (2) a section that reviews corpus-influenced materials and commonly used corpora; and (3) a set of corpus-designed activities that rely on several tools (MICASE, COCA, TextSTAT, for example) to teach a variety of language skills. This book does not intend to provide a complete theoretical foundation for corpus linguistics, but it does aim to provide its readers with the basic theoretical underpinnings and tools needed to work with corpora in the classroom in such a way that they are able to more effectively and efficiently help students to acquire a second language.

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.

Articles in this volume discuss the role and effectiveness of corpora and corpus-linguistic techniques for language teaching but also deal with broader issues such as the relationship between corpora and second language teaching and how the different perspectives of foreign language teachers and applied linguists can be reconciled.

While native corpora and corpus linguistic tools and methods have been used and applied for quite some time in the development of learning and teaching materials, learner corpora are only just beginning to impact the field of language teaching, testing and assessment. This volume helps to close this still existing gap and highlights the great potential of learner corpus research for language pedagogy by presenting a selection of 11 original studies on learner corpora, conducted by established experts as well as by excellent young researchers. The papers included in the volume present new corpora and methods; studies on written as well as spoken learner corpora and on using data-driven learning scenarios in the classroom. All papers include sections on practical and concrete language-pedagogical applications. This volume will be of significant interest to researchers working in corpus linguistics, learner corpus research, second language acquisition and English for Academic and Specific Purposes, as well to language teachers and materials developers.

"Corpus Linguistics in Language Teaching" are derived from the International Seminar, New Trends in Corpus Linguistics for Language Teaching and Translation Studies: In Honour of John Sinclair, organised jointly by the research projects ADELEX (HUM2007-61766, University of Granada) and ECPC (HUM2005-03756, University Jaume I, Castellon), in Granada on 22--24 September 2008."

This book summarises and makes accessible recent work in corpus research, focusing on spoken data and on the place of lexis in grammar and discourse.