Online Corpora in L2 Writing Class. lecture 5 презентация

Outline
What do students need to know about a word to use it correctly in a composition?
Corpus-based language instruction.
Key terms.
Types of corpora.
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).
Practical Applications.
www.wordand phrase.info.
How can COCA help learners in writing?
Why not just use Google?
Differences between corpora and electronic dictionaries.
Concerns about concordancing.
Using COCA.

Why can’t I say…?
S: Teacher, can I say “make” my homeworks?
T: No, you can’t. We say “do” homework.
S: But I say “make” in Arabic.
T: Well, you can’t in English. We “do” homework.
S: But why can’t I say “make”?
T: Because you can’t.
S: But I think I heard someone say “make”, are you suuure?
T: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!

What do students need to know about a word to use it correctly in a composition?
Meanings in different contexts.
Collocations
Lexical patterns (lexicogrammar)
Register

Corpus-based Language Learning
Corpus research is an emerging and a promising field in second language pedagogy.
Corpora and concordances are considered as significant resources for L2 teaching and learning.
A broad agreement that integrating corpora in EFL classrooms promotes language development .

Learner Concordancing
Researchers have found that direct corpus use by learners or learner concordancing has clear advantages to students' L2 writing.
Positive attitude towards corpus use has been reported in a number of studies.

Key Terms
A Corpus
A corpus is a large, principled collection of naturally occurring texts (written or spoken) stored electronically. (Pl corpora)
(Rippen, 2010)
Concordancer
A computer software that is able to search rapidly through large quantities of text for a target item ( morpheme, word, or phrase) and print out all the examples it finds in the context in which they appear.

A concordance
A list of all words found in a specific text or set of texts.
Concordancing
A way to access a corpus of texts in order to show how a word or expression was used in a given context.

Types of Corpora

Corpus of Contemporary American English
(COCA)

Principled collection of texts?

Conference
Usage? increasing / decreasing
Genre/style of speech?

Practical Applications
Standard Interface

In the modern world, media have been becoming a major source to catch information.

People require the fundamental knowledge…
Fundamental or basic? Which one is more natural or appropriate with knowledge?

Fundamental/Basic Knowledge

Comparison
What is the difference between small and little, or Which is more common: small businesses or little businesses?

Synonyms
What are the synonyms of beautiful? Which ones are much more common in fiction than in academic?
What are the only two (besides beautiful) that are quite common in academic?

The new process is a considerable advance in technology.

A considerable advance

How many…….
Collocates

I applied to/for a part time job as a waiter in a restaurant.

Apply to/for

Alternative Interface
www.wordandphrase.info

How can COCA help Learners in writing?
Use of particular constructions, such as which preposition is used with a certain verb, or whether a given phrase sounds natural
Frequency of words or phrases in different styles of English (such as spoken, fiction, or academic)
Collocations: What a word means, or how it is used, by looking at other words that occur nearby.
Synonyms of a given word.
Comparisons of all of the synonyms. Differences in meaning between two words such as big / little, rob / steal.

Why not just use Google?
Looking at differences between different styles or types of English.
Measuring changes over time
Grammar-based searches.
Semantically-based searches( collocates, comparisons, synonyms)
Searching for strings of words.

Differences between Corpora and Electronic Dictionaries
Authentic texts/examples
Frequency of usage over time.
Collocates
Genres

Concerns about Concordancing
Performing searching techniques.
Choosing a suitable concordancing program.
Amount of training.
Language Proficiency
Proper training and assistance to all language levels when involved in learner concordancing.

Using COCA
Learn to search COCA yourself.
Take the “tour” of the site and familiarize yourself with what you can do and how.
Lear from the videos on YouTube on how to use COCA.
Practice doing searches while you are doing your writings.