THE USE OF DIGITAL CORPORA IN FOREIGN

LANGUAGE INSTRUCTIONRecent Developments in

Technological Tools for the Purpose of Facilitating SLA

What’s a Digital Corpus?

Def.: a collection or body of text/s …so a digital corpus is a body of text/s which is

accessible and searchable using computer software.

What are the main functions of a corpus? They allow us to understand more about a particular

area of language via frequency counts, phraseology, and collocations. (Hunston, S. 2002)

Best known for… Concordance lines, which indicate a word’s natural

context

Example of Concordance Lines

ithout our being able to have a rational grasp of their fitness. in fact Law says if God

ow you to see, think, and even begin to grasp at the whole idea of how you can com

and so they follow it. sometimes they'll grasp out at things. uh one can imagine tacti

o i- for me anyways it made it easier to grasp exactly what was going on cuz there's

though it m- l- eas- eas- a little easier to grasp the concepts and easy- more enjoyab

f a bookkeeping thing it's not really my grasp of what's going on or (something) vie

e uh we we got_ i think we have a good grasp on it actually. we're ready to go so if

ginning to look at. we're trying to get a grasp at the landscape-level issues as well.

ents mostly (in the book) but it's to like grasp the concepts I don't know like when t

GRASP: to take a firm hold or grip on something using one’s hands or a tool.

(OED, 2000)

Types of Corpora and Their Potential Uses

General Corpus: a very large body of texts which were selected from various genres. Also known as a reference corpus due to its function as a comparative measure for other corpora.

Learner Corpus: a collection of texts which are produced by learners of a language. Often a searchable cache of essays, the learner corpus allows instructors to locate patterns and differences in students’ use of language.

Specialized Corpus: Several texts from one specific genre (i.e. academic journal articles) for the purpose of understanding features unique to one specific area of communication. Great for ESP.

Types of Corpora and Their Potential Uses Cont.

Pedagogic Corpus: a corpus which is made up of all language a student has been exposed to in a particular class or academic program.

Parallel Corpus: is a corpus of texts that have been translated from one language into another. (i.e. Novels translated from English to Japanese) Allows for investigation of linguistic differences between two or more languages.

Historical Corpus: is a body of texts usually from a similar genre that shows language change over a period of time.

Some ideas for use in Second Language Acquisition

Concordance Lines: students study the actual contextual environments and collocations of key vocabulary terms. (increases noticing (Truscott, J. 1998))

Frequency Counts: students research the historical rise and fall of certain culture-specific terms such as slang and idioms. (i.e. groovy)

Learner Comparison: teacher compiles essays from 101 and 107 and has students cross-research key grammatical and stylistic functions. (i.e. conjunction “and”)

Accessible Corpora Available to YOU

MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) Specialized corpus of spoken academic language

BNC (British National Corpus) General 100 mil word collection of written English texts

Time Corpus Historical corpus of Time magazine text from 1923

OANC (Open American National Corpus) Free, mini downloadable corpus of 14mil words Accompanying software allows for search of own texts

Refereneces

Gavioli, L. (1997). Exploring Texts through the Concordancer: Guiding the Learner. Teaching and Language Corpora, London: Longman, 83-99.

“Grasp” (2002). Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English. Retrieved October 11, 2011 from http://www.cambridge.org/elt/corpus/cancode.htm

Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.