Some Challenges in Using Corpora in Language Teaching
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The lack of knowledge that trainee language teachers have about lexical semantics is an obstacle to the effective use of corpora. Not only is it necessary to learn to use corpus software and interpret the results, but the most valuable linguistic concepts concerning vocabulary study need also to be learnt. Teaching the necessary information and skills at the same time was the motivation for my 2015 publication "Discovering English with Sketch Engine" (2015). In this presentation, we will explore some features of corpus data that are of value to language teaching and learning. This data has to be converted into information and some of the software available performs this task, up to a point, while other information is determined by human observation. In terms of pedagogy, these processes allow users to identify language features such as collocation, colligation, chunks, and grammatical structures that are of considerable value to non-native speakers. |