From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use andLanguage Teaching

A. O’Keefe, M. McCarthy, and R. Carter

Cambridge University Press 2007, 315 pp., £19.50

isbn 13 978 0 521 61686 7

A book which promises us a pathway from the corpusto the classroom? Hadn’t John Higgins and TimJohns shown us some of the tools we could use backin 1984 (Higgins and Johns 1984), and hadn’t Timthen gone on to give us the basic guidelines on how toget there (Johns 1986)? After the pedagogic groundhad been broken by these pioneers, the leading lightsin the field, like the late John Sinclair, then offered usthe vision of a corpus in every classroom (Sinclair1991), and others followed. Glyn Jones and I had a goat getting everybody concordancing in the classroomseventeen years ago (Tribble and Jones 1990), Mike

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Scott gave usWordSmith Tools (Scott 1996), and MikeBarlow developedMonoconc (Barlow 1996). It lookedas if we had the means and the motivation to dig everdeeper into the rich seams of meaning which ranthrough the huge collections of language in use whichwere becoming ever more easily available. But herewe are in 2008, and we still appear to need a book tohelp us to get from the corpus to the classroom.

And it’s true, we do need a book, several books, tohelp us to get across the vast ocean of language datawhich waits to drown the unwary as they try to maketheir way on to the firm ground where real studentswork in real classrooms with real teachers—thoughwhether or not they’re learning the right kind of ‘RealEnglish’ is a question we’ll come to later. The fact isthat although all the major ELT publishers have theirstate-of-the-art corpora, and although the results ofcorpus research permeate every modern dictionaryand grammar reference book, when it comes to theclassroom, Sinclair’s 1991 vision of most studentsand teachers happily interrogating the corpus to pushlearning forward has not yet been realized.

So, here we have From Corpus to Classroom: LanguageUse and Language Teaching. It is written by three verywell respected scholars, researchers, and textbookauthors each with lists of publications as long as yourarm. This latter—an idiom, by the way—only comesup once in the 100-million-word British NationalCorpus (BNC),1 but more of this problem anontoo—and oops, I’ve also just checked the phrase‘more anon’ or ‘more of x anon’ and it doesn’t occur atall in the BNC! I digress, but for a purpose, because asthe authors of From Corpus to Classroom are wellaware, before we can map a pathway from corpus tothe English language classroom, we have to be clearabout which corpus, which English, which students,and in which contexts.

But what’s in the book? Well on the cover, apart fromthe title, there’s a big logo with the CambridgeInternational Corpus ‘Real English Guarantee’—sowe know that we’re on safe ground when it comes tothe content of this book, don’t we? Inside, there’sa Preface, an Introduction and ten other chapters:‘Establishing basic and advanced levels in vocabularylearning’; ‘Lessons from the analysis of chunks’;‘Idioms in everyday use and in language teaching’;‘Grammar and lexis patterns’; ‘Grammar discourseand pragmatics’; ‘Listenership and response’;‘Relational language’; ‘Language and creativity:creating relationships’; ‘Specialising: academic andbusiness corpora’; ‘Exploring teacher corpora’. Eachof these main chapters has a slightly differentstructure, though in several of them there isa ‘Discussion’ or ‘Conclusions and implications’

section which makes explicit links between what’sbeen said in the chapter and language teaching andlearning. It should be clear by now that a recipe bookfor ELT it is not.

The Preface makes this clear. The book’s stated aimsare, in fact: ‘. . . to address the frequent mismatchbetween corpus linguistics research, what goes intomaterials and resources, and what goes on in thelanguage classroom. It aims to highlight theoutcomes which we consider to be relevant ortransferable in terms of how they can informpedagogy, or challenge what and how we teach. Butthe book stops at the classroom door. We do notintend to tell you how to teach and what to do in yourown classes . . .’ (p. xi). The authors go on to say,‘Most of the chapters in this book draw primarily onspoken language corpora, so much so that at onepoint, we debated whether the word ‘‘spoken’’ shouldbe included in the title’ (p. xii).

As a reader, I feel that these two statements indicatea tension between what the book appears to offer, andwhat is actually inside. This in no way denies theexcellence and authority of the scholarship thatinforms everything that it said in the book. It may,however, reduce the relevance of the volume to manyof the readers of this journal. If the book doesn’t takeus into the classroom, and if it focuses on one aspectof language in use, how useful will it be for teachers?An example might help answer this question.

Chapter 4, ‘Idioms in everyday use and in languageteaching’, is a stimulating revisiting of the themesthat Carter and McCarthy have been addressing sincethe mid 1990s, and offers an illuminating guide to theprocess of finding idioms in a corpus. It does this byshowing how you might start by searching for ‘idiom-prone’ words like ‘face’ (p. 83) which can semi-automatically generate lists such as the following:

let’s face it 20

on the face of it 10

face to face 6

keep a straight face 4

etc.

and then go on to do a manual search for idiomsacross a random sample of texts in a corpus in orderto identify and categorize a sizeable number (in thiscase 100), so that in a final step the relativedistribution and uses of these idioms across differentcorpora can be examined. From this study, theauthors identify six categories of idiom, ranging from‘Clausal expressions’ (e.g. ‘look down one’s nose atsb’, [BrE] or ‘give sb a hard time ‘[AmE]), through to

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‘Miscellaneous adjectival, adverbial andprepositional expressions’ (e.g. ‘by and large’[BrE],‘top notch’[AmE]). In the five following sections of thechapter a series of interesting and potentially valuablestudies are presented to the reader. These includeaccounts of:

n the contrasting frequency of idioms in Americanand British English (‘fair enough’ at the top ofthe British list, ‘figure sth out’ at the top of theAmerican),

n the meaning of idioms (e.g. whether idioms refertypically to people or things, ‘be a pain in theneck’ mainly relates to things, events andsituations, ‘let sth wash over sb’ is only usedwith non-human subjects),

n the functions of idioms (e.g. how idioms can beused to summarize or close a narrative),

n how idioms are used in specialized contexts (e.g.how idioms can be used to reduce the formalityof an otherwise formal exchange—the insertionof ‘nitty-gritty’ in an otherwise dry academiclecture, for instance) (pp. 84–94).

At the end of the chapter there is an importantdiscussion of some of the issues that arise whenwe consider what to do with these idioms in theEnglish language teaching classroom. Drawing onProdromou’s (2005) work on Successful Users ofEnglish (SUEs) the authors outline how you could(1) decide that there’s no point in teaching idiomsbecause they’re too difficult or culturally beside thepoint, (2) adopt a non-utilitarian approach toteaching idioms and give learners the freedom toplay with the language ‘so long as comprehensibilityfor the target listeners is not impaired’ (p. 95), or(3) focus on the teaching of relatively morefrequent idioms within a framework of languageawareness raising. The authors then offer anexample of teaching materials by McCarthy andO’Dell based on the Cambridge InternationalCorpus in which the discoursal value and meaningof phrases like ‘strike while the iron is hot’ areinvestigated.

This clear, thorough, and authoritative account ofhow corpus analysis can shed pedagogically relevantlight on an important language phenomenon istypical of the best aspects of From Corpus toClassroom. However, it also highlights some of theissues which I hinted at at the beginning of thisreview.

First, there is the issue of ‘real’ English. At the endof Chapter 5 the authors address the concerns ofthose such as Jenkins (2007) who challenge thesupremacy of the native speaker, and advocate the

need to develop English as lingua franca (ELF)models for ELT curriculum development. O’Keefe,McCarthy, and Carter argue, ‘It has yet to bedemonstrated that ELF exists as a variety ofEnglish rather than as a function [italics in original]of the use of English, which responds to everycontext differently (rather in the way that peopleadapt their language for use with small children oranimals). The assumption that ELF is a varietybrings with it several common inferences: that thevariety is in some way a ‘‘reduced’’ form of thenative variety, that the reduced repertoire caninform a consequently reduced syllabus, and thatidioms are likely to be one of the features that canbe dispensed with. [. . .] But if we are in fact talkingabout a function of English, then there would seemto be no a priori reasons to ‘‘reduce’’ anything;users would make their own choice from theiravailable repertoire of forms, just as any normalperson would when adapting to any context’(pp. 98–9).

By and large, this is the approach that is advocatedthroughout the book when the question of the use ofnative speaker data arises—it’s an issue of choice forlearners and teachers, rather than an issue ofprescription. While this may well be a sensibleposition, when it’s put alongside the CUP marketingstrategy of the ‘Real English Guarantee’ it’s also likelyto raise hackles—as did the original COBUILD

promise of ‘Helping learners with Real English’. Likethe debate in lexicography around invented, adapted,or authentic examples which has been going on sincethe 1980s (see Rundell 1996), I think the argument inELT will also run and run. The great strength of thisvolume is that it makes a contribution whichdemands attention and which is reasoned andempirically based.

Second, there’s the issue of the emphasis on spokenEnglish. While I fully accept the authors’ argumentthat the spoken language has been neglected, Iwould also argue that in English language teaching,it’s been neglected for a number of importantreasons. Firstly, the debate around whose Englishshould be taken as a model is less of an issue withedited, written texts, especially in rapidly growingareas of written interaction like businesscommunication, international administration, andacademic communication. Because of this I wouldsuggest that it is these areas which offer teachers andstudents the least problematic starting point forbringing corpora to the classroom. (See Scott andTribble 2006.) An additional benefit of starting here isthat it’s now relatively easy for teachers and studentsto get hold of a lot of this type of language through

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public domain sources (e.g. online journals,European Union documentation), and these texts canoften be analysed immediately with easily availablecorpus tools (or even via free research tools likeWebCorp).2

This last issue of ease of access and processingleads me to my last point. Spoken corpora arefiercely expensive and difficult to put together— butthere are some that are in the public domain— forexample, the British National Corpus, theMichigan Corpus of Academic Speech Events(MICASE),3 and the British Academic Speech ActCorpus (BASE).4 So while I can understand whythey have chosen to focus on spoken language,I still regret that the authors have drawn so manyexamples from non-public domain corpora. Bydoing this, they have offered tantalizing glimpsesof exciting realities, shown their readers thebright lights of the big city, but have then, ineffect, told them to go back to the farm as onlya few CUP authors and researchers have access tothis material.

So, I found From Corpus to Classroom to bea compelling read, and, from an applied corpuslinguist’s perspective, an important book, full ofinsight, revelations, and new ways of approachingproblems of description and analysis. However, itmay not be such a useful read for the classroomteacher looking for a way of enhancing their nextlesson with an upper-intermediate group, or forthe teacher trainer looking for practical ways ofintroducing students to corpus applications inforeign language teaching. Although this bookmakes a very strong contribution to the field,I do not feel that it offers these readers theclear pathway they might be hoping for. Thiswe still await.

Notes

1 http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/2 http://www.webcorp.org.uk/3 http://legacyweb.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/index.htm

4 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/celte/research/base/

ReferencesBarlow, M. 1996. Monconc Pro. Houston, TX.:Athelstan Press.Higgins, J. and T. Johns. 1984. Computers inLanguage Learning. London: Collins.Jenkins, J. 2007. English as a Lingua Franca: Attitudeand Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Johns, T. 1986. ‘Microconcord: A language-learner’s research tool’. System 14/2: 151–62.Prodromou, L. 2005. ‘ ‘‘You see it’s sort of tricky forthe L2-user’’: the puzzle of idiomaticity in Englishas a Lingua Franca’. Unpublished PhDdissertation, University of Nottingham, UK.Rundell, M. 1996. ‘Computer corpora and theirimpact on lexicography and language teaching’ inC. Mullings, M. Deegan, S. Ross, and S. Kenna(eds.). New Technologies for the Humanities.London: Bowker Saur.Scott, M. 1996. Wordsmith Tools. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.Scott, M. and C. Tribble. 2006. Textual Patterns: KeyWords and Corpus Analysis in Language Education.Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Sinclair, J. M. 1991. Corpus, Concordance andCollocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Tribble, C. and G. Jones. 1990. Concordances in theClassroom. Harlow: Longman.

The reviewerDr Christopher Tribble is a lecturer at King’sCollege, London University, where he teachescourses in English for Academic Purposes, andText and Corpus Analysis. He has published booksand articles on the teaching of writing and oncorpus applications in language education (mostrecently with Mike Scott 2006. Textual Patterns: KeyWords and Corpus Analysis in Language Education.Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins).

Apart from this academic work, Chris Tribble worksas a consultant and trainer in project managementand project evaluation, and as a photographer witha special interest in documentary photography.Email: christopher.tribble@kcl.ac.ukHome page: www.ctribble.co.ukdoi:10.1093/elt/ccn005

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