Using corpora in our teaching: what is available and how can we best use it? – #ELTchat Summary

admin Summary December 19, 2011 | 0

Using corpora in our teaching: what is available and how can we best use it?

A quick word for the uninitiated! ELTChat is a twitter-based forum where keen ELTers meet on Wednesday morning and/or evening (depending on just HOW keen they are) and hotly debate a voted-for topic.

After which, some kind (if misguided) soul offers to write a summary of the chat, its pert points and lusty links.

So here’s what happened on Wednesday morning at 12pm GMT…

Many of us have either fallen in love with corpora or looked at them and gone, “wow, cool… err… now how on earth could I use that in class…?” Well fear not! ELT Chat is here to save the day – with ideas and links galore… millions of links, in fact…

Although Marisa Constantinides’ “smiley” emoticon was charitably humouring my calling Wednesday morning’s ELT Chat “linktastic” (I’ll get my coat) it kinda was. People seemed to be hitting the “paste” key as frequently as they were the “eltchat” hashtag.

This at least demonstrated the awareness of material out in the big wide webby world, and gave everyone (as now I give to you) a smorgasbord of yummy material to get browsing through for your classes.

Below is the summary, with the categorised links at the end of the text.

How to use corpora

This was the “show me the money!” moment…while many of us had seen and used corpora, there was some confusion about HOW to use them effectively.

A summary of the ideas and points raised:

Ideas for general use:

Many use corpora for teacher training but not so often with students – why?
Useful if the student asks a question about a word in a very specific situation and the teacher is not sure which way is most common.
Checking intuitions for academic English and translation.
We needn’t get too academic – Google is one of the best corpora around, put in the word or phrase, hit search and students can see the item in context. Although a little dodgy for younger learners as they could end up being directed to sites with more “X”s in them than most words do.

In-class activities:

For EAP students – when they want to check if the verb+noun combo in their essay is correct or not.
For EAP/ESP – take most common collocation from business corpus and ask students to discuss why they are the most common. And discussion on the intonation of these common expressions.
Ask students to choose 5 collocations from a text, then look to see how common/useful etc they are.
Incorrect collocations infogap – one learner has list of collocations, one learner has error-strewn text.
Get students to write up a corpus of their teacher to find the most common expression you use!
Just record one single lesson and tell them to create a corpus of common errors.

Dictionaries vs. concordances

Much more cognitive value so vocabulary is going to stick.
Dictionaries can be used with concordances to give students many in-context examples and then personalise them.

So a tricky topic but well executed – many thanks to all involved!

We even behaved ourselves when Shaun was out of the room dealing with a plumber.

A final thought… if corpus data reflects authentic use… and authentic use is not necessarily correct… are we causing problems for our students?

And now the promised links…

Articles on using corpora

Article on using corpora and whether it’s just a fad

http://www.tesl-ej.org/ej32/a1.html

Using corpus to write teaching materials – article

http://peo.cambridge.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52:the-real-thing-using-corpora-to-write-language-training-materials-by-bill-mascull-&catid=2:general-articles&Itemid=8

Jamie Keddie on the what and the how of corpora

http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/vocabulary/corpora/

Article by Nik Peachy on using concordancers