The importance of corpus-based research for language teachers  

Oleh:

Conrad, S.M.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: SYSTEM: An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics (Full Text) vol. 27 no. 1 (Mar. 1999), page 1-18.
Topik: Computer applications; Computerized text analysis; Corpus linguistics; English adverbials; Grammatical analysis; Language use; Registers
Fulltext: Conrad_S.M.pdf (301.31KB)

Isi artikel

In the past decade, interest has grown tremendously in the use of language corpora and computer tools for language education. Unfortunately, however, publications addressed to teachers have focused almost entirely on concordancing and lexical or lexico-grammatical studies. They have not introduced teachers to more comprehensive types of corpus-based stud- ies, even though these studies also have important implications for teaching. In this article, I introduce the fundamental characteristics of corpus-based research and then illustrate such research with a study of a complex grammatical feature in English: linking adverbials (i.e. connecting expressions such as therefore and in other words). With this sample study I show that corpus-based research is useful even with features that cannot be studied with automatic computer programs. In addition, this research facilitates investigation of multiple character- istics of a feature so that we can gain a fuller understanding of its use. Speci®cally, for linking adverbials I examine frequency, semantic category, grammatical structure, placement within the clause, the speci®c item used, and variation across registers (academic prose, newspaper reportage, ®ction, and conversation)Ðas well as the interactions of these characteristics. I also illustrate how this corpus-based study can lead to more principled classroom materials and activities

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