Will Corpus Linguistics Revolutionize Grammar Teaching in the 21st Century?

Conrad, Susan

doi:10.2307/3587743

Cited by 166 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…We argue that if corpus applications and corpus findings are to reach the 'right' audience (i.e. language learners), they must be integrated at the very core of our teacher education courses (see also Conrad 2000;Chapelle 2001). In the context of teacher education for teachers who are speakers of English as a Lingua Franca, Seidlhofer's (1999, p. 240) comments in relation to corpus linguistics: 'teachers who have a good idea as to what options are in principle available to them, and have learnt to evaluate these critically, sceptically and confidently, are unlikely to be taken in by the absolute claims and exaggerated promises often made by any one educational philosophy, linguistic theory, teaching method or textbook'.…”

Section: Corpus Linguistics and Language Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Language Corpora in Initial Teacher Education: Pedagogic Issues and Practical Applications

O’Keeffe¹,

Farr²

2003

TESOL Quarterly

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The vast increase in the number of corpus‐based materials, such as dictionaries and grammars, attests to the importance of corpus linguistics to English language description. Developments are also evident in the use of corpora in the classroom in data‐driven learning (Johns, 1991). These rapid developments in the use of language‐related technology have not been matched by updated practices in teacher education. This article makes a case for the inclusion of corpus linguistics in initial language teacher education to enhance teachers' research skills and language awareness. The authors offer examples of corpus‐based tasks for increasing students' understanding of word classes, register‐related grammatical choices, and socioculturally conditioned grammatical choices. Practical considerations for the integration of language corpora in a teacher education program are outlined.

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Section: Corpus Linguistics and Language Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Language Corpora in Initial Teacher Education: Pedagogic Issues and Practical Applications

O’Keeffe¹,

Farr²

2003

TESOL Quarterly

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“…Corpus research has played a role in demonstrating how the vocabulary words and grammar are complexly interconnected; knowing a word is inseparable from knowing how it behaves grammatically in a sentence (see, e.g., Conrad, 2000). A lexico-grammatical approach teaches vocabulary and grammar together.…”

Section: Ddl's Strengths For Teaching Specialized Vocabulary Ddl Hasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Particularly in grammar teaching, there has been increased interest in explicit "focus on form" instruction that emphasizes raising students' awareness of grammatical forms as they occur in their discourse context-that is, preserving the meaning and function of the complete utterance (Brandl, 2008;Conrad, 2000;Ellis, Basturkmen, & Loewen, 2002). Focus on form teaches form, meaning and use simultaneously by calling attention to a specific form as a necessary tool for successfully completing a communicative task (Ellis, Basturkmen, & Loewen, 2002).…”

Section: Ddl's Strengths For Teaching Specialized Vocabulary Ddl Hasmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Analytical System for Determining Disciplinary Vocabulary for Data-Driven Learning: An Example from Civil Engineering

Otto¹

2000

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Data-driven learning (DDL), an inductive teaching approach in which students learn through corpus interaction, has gained recent traction as way to teach specialized vocabulary in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes. There is little research, however, that addresses how to choose specialized vocabulary for teaching with DDL.This study addressed this gap in research by exploring the potential of a three-part analytical, corpus-based system for determining vocabulary to teach with DDL for a specific context of language use. This system included (1) identifying words that were significantly more frequent in a specialized expert corpus than in a corpus of general English, (2) narrowing to words that showed patterned differences in use between the specialized corpus and a student corpus, and (3) narrowing further to words with salient enough patterns of usage to teach with DDL. This three-part system was applied to the context of civil engineering in order to find vocabulary words to teach civil engineering students with low-proficiency writing skills at Portland State University.For the first step in my analytical system, I found 201 words that occurred significantly more frequently in civil engineering practitioner writing than in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and that met requirements for frequency, distribution, and other criteria. I tested the second and third steps on 45 of these words and identified 14 words that showed evidence of needing to be taught and being well suited to DDL.After reflecting on my process, I found that the analytical system was successful in meeting my goals for finding civil engineering vocabulary for data-driven activities. I ii also made several observations that may be useful for ESP teachers who are interested in applying this methodology for their classes, the most notable of which were:1. The system was especially useful for connecting words that are not explicitly civil engineering themed (e.g., encountered or using) to important writing functions that civil engineers perform.2. Although it provided a systematic basis for vocabulary teaching decisions, the process was generally time-consuming and required complex judgments, which indicated that it may only be worth performing if teachers plan to regularly incorporate DDL vocabulary instruction into their course.iii Acknowledgments

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“…The use of corpus-based findings in order to inform L2 teaching materials has been emphasized by many researchers (see, for example, Biber and Reppen, 2002;Conrad, 1999;2000;Carter and McCarthy, 1995;Holmes, 1988;Harwood, 2005). It is through corpus-based studies that the "scope" of certain features can be investigated (Hulstijn, 1995).…”

Section: Suggestions For the Improvement Of Teaching Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Romer (1996) the prediction meaning of shall is among one of the most important meanings (with 31%) in BNC data evaluation of Spoken English. According to Conrad (2000) rare grammatical features can have important discourse functions in particular registers hence it is vital that decisions about pedagogy consult corpus linguistics by "taking into account functional descriptions and frequency information as well as analyses of students' needs".…”

Section: Suggestions For the Improvement Of Teaching Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modal Auxiliary Verbs in Prescribed Malaysian English Textbooks

Mukundan

Khojasteh²

2011

ELT

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The use of corpus-based findings in order to inform L2 teaching materials have been emphasized by many researchers owing to the fact that the studies of authentic texts have revealed some inconsistencies between the use of grammatical structures in corpora, and those found in language textbooks that are based purely on hunch. Therefore, by comparing a textbook corpus with the British National Corpus, this study attempts to shed light on the extent in which modal auxiliary verbs presented in the Malaysian prescribed textbooks are identical with those used by native speakers. The findings showed that there are discrepancies between English language textbooks and real language use. Findings from this study contribute to the improvement of pedagogical practices in the teaching of the modal system and provide a sense of familiarity with textbooks' content thus assisting educators in identifying the particular strengths and weaknesses in textbooks already in use.

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Will Corpus Linguistics Revolutionize Grammar Teaching in the 21st Century?

Cited by 166 publications

References 30 publications

Using Language Corpora in Initial Teacher Education: Pedagogic Issues and Practical Applications

Using Language Corpora in Initial Teacher Education: Pedagogic Issues and Practical Applications

An Analytical System for Determining Disciplinary Vocabulary for Data-Driven Learning: An Example from Civil Engineering

Modal Auxiliary Verbs in Prescribed Malaysian English Textbooks

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