Week 6
Teaching with Corpora

Corpus is a principled collection of texts which is accessible via computer. There are several different corpuses available for use and this vast amount of data can help classroom teaching.

First, it is important to understand how corpuses are constructed and why they would be useful for teaching. Reppen (2010) Ch.1. provides information on this by stating the importance of meaningful contexts and activities for language teaching. Using corpus in order to decide what to teach will also enable teachers focus on what the students will encounter the most in the target domain.

The chapter goes on providing some ideas to use a corpus with language learners. Flowerdew (2009) also provides some activities. One of the activities can be developed by using word lists and concordance lines. Word lists will help understand how frequent certain words occur and concordance lines will show the context that the word is used in. Students can identify the parts of speech, suffixes, word forms and spot the words that they do not know. They can check what other words go together with a certain word and they can even learn the different registers and the pragmatic uses of that word, whether it is more common in spoken or written language.

Although there are not many language teaching books based on corpus, corpus linguistics is growing rapidly. It seems to provide many benefits for language teaching; yet, there is definitely need for more studies and activities to be developed. This way, there will be more sources available for teachers that are used and proven to be useful in classroom.