It's like asking a thousand native speakers at once.
Teaching English as a foreign language in a classroom setting can be quite challenging. Learners are not immersed in the language in their everyday life, and often the classroom is the only place where they receive English-language input. It is thus important that the teacher presents the students with input that is not only level-appropriate, but also idiomatic and reflective of English as it is used today.
A frequent challenge in this scenario is that the teacher is often not a native speaker of English, but an advanced learner themselves. While their proficiency allows them to make informed decisions and judgements about language use, their knowledge of English has limits. To support their teaching, they rely on typical resources provided by the school, such as textbooks and grammars. However, what if the teacher has a question about language use that cannot be answered by the textbook? The Internet may provide answers, but we can never be sure how reliable they are. Some teachers have native speaker friends/colleagues that they can turn to for help, but what if they're busy or don't know the answer?
Wouldn't it be great if teachers could ask hundreds of native speakers about any grammatical or lexical question, anytime, and get an answer in seconds?
That's exactly what corpora can do for you.
Linguistic corpora are large collections of digitized language data, compiled from natural language output produced by hundreds of native speakers/writers. Corpora can be searched for language phenomena - quickly and efficiently. Corpora can tell you which kinds of language constructions people use (or don't use), and also how often or rarely they use them. You want to know what the ten most frequent nouns in English press language are? Which preposition follows a certain verb, and when? Which adjective most frequently precedes a particular noun? Corpora can give you the answer with just a few clicks. Furthermore, corpora contain natural language data. Teachers don't need to make up artificial sentences anymore: They can use sentences that were actually produced by native speakers in authentic contexts.
In this seminar, we will learn more about the potential of using linguistic corpora in language teaching, in the following areas:
- teaching preparation
- assessing the idiomaticity of school textbooks
- error correction and prediction
- in-class use of corpora
You will be introduced to
- corpus-linguistic tools and platforms
- different kinds of linguistic corpora (spoken, written, web, learner, ...)
- corpus-linguistic techniques
- practical applications of corpora in teaching
For graded credit, participants will plan and design a corpus-informed teaching unit on a topic and language phenomenon of their choice (similar to the teaching units included in Le Foll 2021).
This class will be held online. Participants require a computer/laptop so they can do the corpus-linguistic activities during the meetings. A smartphone or tablet will not be enough (as we cannot install the software needed on them). Please contact me if you want to participate, but do not have a computer or laptop. Perhaps we can make arrangements with the uni.
Note: Participants are not required to know corpus linguistics in any way. You also don't need to be computer experts. However, we will be working with computers and software on a regular basis. I expect participants to be open to using and experimenting with unfamiliar software. |
