Online Corpora in L2 Writing Class. lecture 5

1. Lecture 5 Online Corpora in L2 Writing Class

Lecturer: MA Saule Yessenaman

2. Outline

• What do students need to know about a word to use it correctly in a
composition?
• Corpus-based language instruction.
• Key terms.
• Types of corpora.
• Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).
• Practical Applications.
• www.wordand phrase.info.
• How can COCA help learners in writing?
• Why not just use Google?
• Differences between corpora and electronic dictionaries.
• Concerns about concordancing.
• Using COCA.

3. Why can’t I say…?

S: Teacher, can I say “make” my homeworks?
T: No, you can’t. We say “do” homework.
S: But I say “make” in Arabic.
T: Well, you can’t in English. We “do” homework.
S: But why can’t I say “make”?
T: Because you can’t.
S: But I think I heard someone say “make”, are you
suuure?
T: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!

4. What do students need to know about a word to use it correctly in a composition?

• Meanings in different contexts.
• Collocations
• Lexical patterns (lexicogrammar)
• Register

5. Corpus-based Language Learning

• Corpus research is an emerging and a promising field in second
language pedagogy.
• Corpora and concordances are considered as significant resources for
L2 teaching and learning.
• A broad agreement that integrating corpora in EFL classrooms
promotes language development .

6. Learner Concordancing

• Researchers have found that direct corpus use by learners or
learner concordancing has clear advantages to students' L2
writing.
• Positive attitude towards corpus use has been reported in a
number of studies.

7. Key Terms

A Corpus
A corpus is a large, principled collection of naturally occurring texts
(written or spoken) stored electronically. (Pl corpora)
(Rippen, 2010)
Concordancer
A computer software that is able to search rapidly through large quantities of
text for a target item ( morpheme, word, or phrase) and print out all the examples
it finds in the context in which they appear.

8.

A concordance
A list of all words found in a specific text or set of texts.
Concordancing
A way to access a corpus of texts in order to show how a word or
expression was used in a given context.

9. Types of Corpora

10.

Corpus of Contemporary American
English
(COCA)

11.

12. Principled collection of texts?

13.

14.

15.

Conference
Usage? increasing / decreasing
Genre/style of speech?

16.

17.

18. Practical Applications

Standard Interface

19.

In the modern world, media have been becoming a major source to
catch information.

20.

21.

People require the fundamental knowledge…
Fundamental or basic? Which one is more natural or appropriate with
knowledge?

22. Fundamental/Basic Knowledge

23. Comparison

• What is the difference between small and little, or Which is
more common: small businesses or little businesses?

24.

25.

26. Synonyms

• What are the synonyms of beautiful? Which ones are much
more common in fiction than in academic?
• What are the only two (besides beautiful) that are quite
common in academic?

27.

28.

The new process is a considerable advance in technology.

29. A considerable advance

30.

How many…….
Collocates

31.

32.

I applied to/for a part time job as a waiter in a restaurant.

33. Apply to/for

34. Alternative Interface

www.wordandphrase.info

35.

36.

37.

38.

39. How can COCA help Learners in writing?

• Use of particular constructions, such as which preposition is used with a
certain verb, or whether a given phrase sounds natural
• Frequency of words or phrases in different styles of English (such as
spoken, fiction, or academic)
• Collocations: What a word means, or how it is used, by looking at other
words that occur nearby.
• Synonyms of a given word.
• Comparisons of all of the synonyms. Differences in meaning between
two words such as big / little, rob / steal.

40. Why not just use Google?

• Looking at differences between different styles or types of
English.
• Measuring changes over time
• Grammar-based searches.
• Semantically-based searches( collocates, comparisons,
synonyms)
• Searching for strings of words.

41. Differences between Corpora and Electronic Dictionaries

• Authentic texts/examples
• Frequency of usage over time.
• Collocates
• Genres

42. Concerns about Concordancing

• Performing searching techniques.
• Choosing a suitable concordancing program.
• Amount of training.
• Language Proficiency
Proper training and assistance to all language levels when
involved in learner concordancing.

43. Using COCA

• Learn to search COCA yourself.
• Take the “tour” of the site and familiarize yourself with what you can
do and how.
• Lear from the videos on YouTube on how to use COCA.
• Practice doing searches while you are doing your writings.