Jeanne McCarten and published by Cambridge University Press is a booklet of no more than 30 pages. Notwithstanding its few pages, it is a work of paramount importance on what concerns the use of corpus in language teaching. That is why this book is worth reading. Not only does it address fundamentals of corpus linguistics and how information about language derived from corpus research can be used to inform vocabulary teaching, but it also suggests practical classroom approaches to foster vocabulary learning and comprehension. Besides this, the content is organized in a simple and direct manner. There are four main chapters: 1. Lessons from the Corpus, 2. Lessons for the Classroom, 3. Concluding remarks and 4. Appendices. I shall then make a brief description of each chapter.The first chapter is the biggest one and is split in nine sections. It addresses some basic concepts on corpus and vocabulary issues. Right at the outset, the following two questions are posed: "How many words are there and how many words do we need to teach?" and "What can a corpus tell us about vocabulary?"The author attempts to answer the first question raising important concepts on vocabulary learning, such as the number of words one needs to know in order to get along in English. According to some research "learners who know the most frequent 2,000 words should be able to understand almost 80 percent of the words in an average text, and a knowledge of 5,000 words increases learners' understanding to 88.7 percent" (MCCARTEN, 2007, p. 1). On what concerns spoken language, according to the author, an understanding of 1,800 words would be enough as word repetition is much higher in speech. From these considerations, it is possible to point out the first lesson derived from a corpus: to identify and give priority to the most frequent 2,000 and 5,000 vocabulary items in teaching.
As we have proposed a terminological perspective for the description of fictional lexical units, as multifunctional units or vocab-terms, used in children's fantasy literary discourse of the Harry Potter series, this dissertation intends to contribute first and foremost to the acknowledgment of the terminological status of this kind of units in the scope of terminology studies. In a transdisciplinary approach, we have articulated precepts from diverse branches of study in order to compose our theoretical and methodological framework. Our work is grounded on four lines of enquiry within terminology studies, Ethnoterminology, Sociocognitive Theory of Terminology, Cultural Terminology and Textual Terminology, along with fictional worlds' semantics and corpus-driven terminographic procedures, which allowed us to not only understand the specificities of fictional terms, but also generate a glossary of possible interest mainly to folklorists. To these ends, we used a study corpus made up of the seven volumes of the literary Harry Potter series and the other three companion volumes, in English, which expand on the same fictional world created by J. K. Rowling. This corpus, when processed by the program WordSmith Tools 6.0 and its three tools: Concord, KeyWords and WordList, allowed term identification and retrieval of the linguistic contexts of the terms' occurrences. The textual macrostructure and microstructure were described, a conceptual system that underlies the theme of the books was built and a terminological record was created, of which fifteen were filled out so as to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal. We have found that children's fantasy literary discourse, as manifested in the Harry Potter books, is endowed with specificities in the interior of the universe of fantasy literary discourse and with interdiscursivity with the universe of ethnoliterary discourse, such as folklore. The fictional lexical units fulfil terminological status in children's fantasy literary discourse of the Harry Potter series on account of the following aspects: they are part of a conceptual system structured within a specific theme, that is Witchcraft and Wizardry; are part and parcel of the composition of a fictional world semioticly built by the modelling force of literary language; are endowed with intertextuality and interdiscursivity intra-and interuniverse of discourse with ethnoliterary discourses; establish a system of values in positive and negative axiological investments; designate concepts made up of semes from the universe of discourse they are used in; refer to particulars of a fictional world; regarding their symbolic function, they work in the imaginary plane, in a way that it is in the fictional narratives that we find the reasons to conceive the symbolic relations.
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