Applications of Corpora in English Language Learning

Yen-Liang Lin (Eric)

Corpus linguistics

A corpus is a collection of (1) machine-readable (2) authentic texts (including transcripts of spoken data) which is (3) sampled to be (4) representative of a particular language or language variety” (McEnery, Xiao and Tono, 2006, p. 5).

A large corpus provides evidence of typical formulaic language use.

Google search engine

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Disadvantages of using Google search engine

Very time-consuming to filter out irrelevant information

Queries not flexible and specific enoughMixed with native and nonnative speakers’

productionsThe output of the data is unorganized.Too much data to make a generalization.

Collocations

A sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance.

a questiona requestan applicationone’s resignation

RaiseAdvance/ makeFile / make / submit Tender / submit/ hand in

提出… . V + N

______________ a check 開支票 ______________ perfume 擦香水 ______________ the jackpot 中獎

Collocations V + N

我早上起床時感到劇烈的頭痛。When I woke up this morning, I _________ a serious headache.

這種情況下會出現什麼困難？What kind of difficulties may _____________ from this situation?

青少年需要一些基本生活技能的訓練，包括洗自己的衣服。Teenagers need some basic life-skills training, including how to_________ their own laundry.

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V + Prep I congratulate you ______ your promotion. remind him _______ something be accused _______ corruption

N + Prep A check _______ $500 UK is an abbreviation _______ United

Kingdom.

Collocations

Adj + N交通壅擠 ___________ traffic濃茶 _____________ tea空頭支票 ____________ check酸雨 ____________ rain大風大雨 ____________ rain ____________ wind

Collocations

Oxford Online Collocation Dictionary

MUST<http://miscollocation.appspot.com/>

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The Tango English collocation

COCA

Corpus of Contemporary American English (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/)

COCA, created by Professor Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, provides free access to an authentic American English corpus of 450 million words.

COCA has well-designed corpus tools tailored made for corpus research.

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Just the word (JTW)

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Chinese-English Parallel Corpora

The TOTALrecall Bilinugal concordancer is developed by Professor Jason Chang at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan http://candle.fl.nthu.edu.tw/totalrecall/totalrecall/totalrecall.aspx?funcID=1

Jukuu ( 句酷 ) is a multilingual translation memory system. http://www.jukuu.com/

TAUS is a multilingual translation memory system. http://www.tausdata.org/index.php/home

JuKuu

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JuKuu 2

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Eric Lin