Title: The importance of corpus-based research for language teachers
Abstract: 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 studies, 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 characteristics of a feature so that we can gain a fuller understanding of its use. Specifically, for linking adverbials I examine frequency, semantic category, grammatical structure, placement within the clause, the specific item used, and variation across registers (academic prose, newspaper reportage, fiction, and conversation)—as well as the interactions of these characteristics. I also illustrate how this corpus-based study can lead to more principled classroom materials and activities.
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 155
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