Concordancing and ELT

Porntip Bodeepongse

What is a corpus?

We can define 'corpus' as a

body of texts:

representing authentic language use for use in linguistic research usually machine-readable

What can corpora be used for?

Studies of lexis (vocabulary)

How frequently is a certain word used? How many meanings does the word have? In what environment does the word normally occur? Does the word occur with the same frequency in all types of text? Which preposition follows a particular verb (e.g.depend) or adjective (e.g.different)?

Studies of grammar
What is the distribution of two competing grammatical constructions (e.g. the will-future vs. the begoing-to future, or the s-possessive vs. the of-possessive)? Which verb form is preferred when the subject is a collective noun?

 Are verbs such as start, begin, finish, continue followed by an infinitive or an ing clause? Is a that-clause or an infinitive clause the most common complement type with adjectives such as sure, certain? Is the passive generally used with or without an agent phrase?

Variation studies
Does a certain word or grammatical construction occur with the same frequency in different text types? Is there a difference between the vocabularies of written and spoken English? Do different regional varieties of English show different patterns in the use of a certain word / phrase / grammatical feature?

Discourse studies
What are the functions of discourse markers such as well, you know, kind of, you see? How are sentences connected in different types of text?

Types of corpora
spoken corpora/ written corpora corpora from different regions (e.g. Br/Am) corpora with a mixture of genres (e.g. fiction, academic writing, newspaper articles) learner corpora, etc.

Concordances

(derived from corpora)

a list showing various occurrences of a word, with context. OR a list of occurrences of a particular word, part of a word or combination of words, in its contexts drawn from a text corpus.

What is a concordancer?
A piece of software, either installed on a computer or accessed through a website, which can be used to search, access and analyse language from a corpus. They can be useful in exploring the relationships between words and can give us very accurate information about the way language is authentically used.

Advantages:
Concordances allow learners (+ researchers) to study different uses of a word. Good for vocabulary training (collocation, syntax, different meanings)

 in teaching (working with vocabulary or grammar, correcting essays, answering questions from students etc.) for teaching material (grammar books, vocabulary in text books etc.) for writing (checking prepositions, collocations etc.)

Ideas for using concordancers with students:

Exploring collocations Looking at students own errors Understanding different uses and meanings Finding genuine examples of language use Materials creation by students

Some English corpora:

The British National Corpus

(http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/) (http://www.rdg.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ll/ba se_corpus/) http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/in dex.htm

British Academic Spoken English Corpus

Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE)