Angela Chambers

Corpus consultation and advanced learners’ writing skills in French

In the rapidly changing environment of language learning and teaching, electronic literacies have an increasingly important role to play. While much research on new literacies focuses on the World Wide Web, the aim in this study is to investigate the importance of corpus consultation as a new type of literacy which is of particular relevance in the context of language learning and teaching. After briefly situating the theoretical and pedagogical context of the study in relation to authenticity and learner autonomy, the paper describes an empirical study involving eight postgraduate students of French. As part of a Masters course they write a short text and subsequently attempt to improve it by using concordancing software to consult a small corpus containing texts on a similar subject. The analysis of the results reveals a significant number of changes made by the learners which may be classified as follows in order of frequency: grammatical errors (gender and agreement, prepositions, verb forms/mood, negation and syntax); misspellings, accents and hyphens; lexico-grammatical patterning (native language interference, choice of verb and inappropriate vocabulary); and capitalisation. The conclusion notes that the situation in which these students found themselves (i.e. faced with a text on which the teacher had indicated phrases which could be improved) is replicated in many cases every day, and suggests that corpus consultation may have a useful role to play in the context of interactive feedback, particularly in cases where traditional language learning resources are of little use.

Popularising corpus consultation by language learners and teachers

Summarising the progress in relation to the use of corpora in language learning made between the first TaLC conference in 1994 and the time of writing their article, McEnery and Wilson (1997: 5) use the term ‘percolation’ to describe how the exploitation of corpora has progressed from the domain of research to that of teaching. This paper focuses on corpus consultation by learners, examining the main publications relating to learner access to corpora since the early nineteen-nineties. The features common to these studies are examined with a view to identifying which aspects facilitate the popularisation of the activity. Aspects studied include languages, levels of study, corpus resources, types of corpus consultation, and the learners’ evaluation of the activity. The results reveal that consultation of corpora by learners appears to be increasing in higher education. They also show that some but not all of those active in this area create custom-made corpora of familiar texts rather than use the ready-made corpora which are available. Learner evaluations reveal positive reactions to the activity, as well as highlighting a number of important obstacles.

Integrating a corpus of classroom discourse in language teacher education: the case of discourse markers

While language teacher education programmes and language syllabi in secondary education encourage the use of the target language in the classroom, resources to support teachers in this endeavour, such as books with useful phrases, do not state that the examples they provide are corpus-based, i.e. drawn from actual language use rather than invented phrases. This paper investigates whether consultation of a corpus of classroom discourse can be of benefit in language teacher education. The paper describes a project involving the creation of corpora of classroom discourse in French and Spanish, and the use of these corpora with student teachers. After setting the research in the context of corpora and classroom interaction, it examines issues such as the content of the corpora, the type of consultation (direct or mediated by the teacher), and the student teachers’ evaluation of the activity. Special attention is paid to one particular aspect of classroom interaction, discourse markers.

Language teachers with corpora in mind: from starting steps to walking tall

Although the use of corpus data in language learning is a steadily growing research area, direct access to corpora by teachers and learners and the use of the data in the classroom are developing slowly. This paper explores how teachers can integrate corpus approaches in their practice. After situating the topic in relation to current research and practice in ICT and language learning, we examine some easily available resources, suggesting how they can provide examples of naturally occurring discourse for use in the language classroom. Beginning with easily available online corpus resources with built-in concordancers which require no prior technical training, we continue by discussing the challenges which more advanced use of corpora presents. This is illustrated by examples from corpora of business communication and casual conversation. We conclude by emphasising that there is considerable scope for both research and dissemination in relation to corpus applications in language learning.

Investigating EFL teachers’ perceptions of task-based language teaching in higher education in China

While task-based language teaching (TBLT) is a teaching methodology favoured by the Chinese Ministry of Education, it has not been sufficiently researched to be validated empirically in practice in...