Teachology

English is useful and spoken all over the real and virtual world. Most of the people learn it
by listening to it, by imitating it, by playing with it, by studying it. What happens when they do not
know a word? They just skip it, deduce it from the context or look it up on Google or in a
dictionary. But all these so-called “strategies” have their own limitations, but also a joint solution –
the corpora of the language they study.
A collection of texts (plural: corpora) is called a corpus if we use it for language research.
These collections can be categorised according to their size: from the essays collected from a class
up to the texts provided by the Internet. These small or huge collections of texts can be used by
different types of people: from the linguists that compile dictionaries up to students that want to
study a certain language.
The linguists have to face the big danger of missing words as in “The Professor and the
Madman”, a film about a professor, James Murray, who in 1857 began compiling the Oxford
English Dictionary and was helped by W. C. Minor, a doctor who submitted over 10,000 entries
while he was undergoing mental illness treatment. At that time, lexicographers did not have a
computer able to find all the words, to order them according to their frequency and help the scientist
avoid missing words, idioms, collocations.
Nowadays the presence of computers in our lives makes this problem a little easier to tackle
with. Whoever might want to study a language can use the corpora to find out how words are used
in a language. Software like Google for non-professionals or Sketch Engine for dictionary makers
on a PC that has Internet connection provides all the examples of a word in context, revealing their
concordance. The amount of information can be enormous, but our “friend”, the computer can
summarize all these contexts, collocations and phrases for the word we are working with.
Another category of people that can benefit of studying corpora are teachers. They want to
teach common structures before rare ones, and to provide their students with authentic examples.
Out of the 66,803 concordances “allegiance” gets into, they can discover the modifiers of the word,
nouns that are modified by the word, verbs that have “allegiance” as an object or a subject,
prepositions that go with “allegiance”, who are the possessors of “allegiance”, etc. The word being
examined in the task is in the middle, so that patterns are more easily discernible. Teachers teach
and students learn that someone can pledge, swear, owe, switch, profess, declare, shift, proclaim,
vow, abjure, reaffirm “allegiance”, that “allegiance” skips, lies, recites, compromises, fluctuates,
binds, shifts, unites, divides, tears, that “allegiance” can be to, of, in, with, from, and so on. This is
according to Leech, 1997, the so-called soft version.
When using the soft version, teachers can manipulate the corpus examples in a number of
ways. They can restrict the examples to a specific medium (writing/speech), and genre or text type
(newspaper article, novel). They can also decide on the amount of text to give learners - only a few
words on either side of the key word, an entire sentence, or a paragraph. Finally, they can edit the
samples to remove sentences that seem too difficult for the learners. This manipulation should be
carried out with the understanding that the adapted samples do not accurately show the frequency of
a language item.
Moreover, there are cases when the restriction of the number of examples cannot be done
without affecting the representativeness of the sample, for example, when selecting examples for
students of below-intermediate level. Thus, there are three options the teacher can opt for: make
simpler examples, select suitable sentences in a way that their make-up approximates the original
sample, or avoid dealing with problems of frequency. The edited sample may still be expected to
include at least some of the most frequent collocations.
The hard version requires learners to have direct access to computer and corpus facilities
and have the skills to use them. If a student or a class of students are fond of flying, they might be
interested in the language related to it. For example, corpora software has an instant corpus tool,
where text on a topic is gathered from the web in a few minutes (by a teacher or, as a class exercise,
by the students) and this can turn into data for a mini research project. The variety of information in
corpus samples can provide material for homework assignments. Learners can do the tasks outside
of class so that classroom time can be devoted to feedback discussion and perhaps some fine-tuning
by the teacher.
In between, there can be combinations, especially when the teacher and learners take
decisions collaboratively. They have the opportunity to modify the aims and direction of the lesson
on the spot according to what happens. If learners cannot find enough clues in the concordance or
sentences, they have the option to get more text by clicking either on the key word or a special
button.
As both people and language seem to be living organisms, they react accordingly to all the
stimuli around. They have to be updated, to progress, to develop. Unfortunately, these cannot be
done without pain, reluctance, fight, conflicts, and contradictions. Unfortunately again, this is not a
quick process. It is impossible for human beings, ephemeral creatures to fight against time and
language that have totally different limits and rhythms. Teachers should assist and guide their
students in their language investigations. So, teachers should be aware that language is more than
information and technology is not always an enemy, but not always a friend also. Students should
not stick to rules and exceptions that lead to a "single correct answer". Corpora and technology
offer them access to innumerable alternatives and a huge source of knowledge and efficient tools to
use.
To end with a popular analogy, when learners consult a dictionary or grammar they are
given fish; when they actively engage in pattern recognition they learn how to fish. And if they are
provided with the right technology, they get a fishing rod they can use to catch the golden fish from
the huge pond that is called language learning.

Bibliography

Leech, Geoffrey - Teaching and language corpora: A convergence. In A. Wichmann, S.

Fligelstone, T. McEnery & G. Knowles (Eds.), Teaching and language corpora (pp. 1-23), New
York, Addison Wesley Longman, 1997