Corpus Linguistics Technology In Teaching English As A Foreign Language

Abstract

The article considers corpus linguistics technology from the linguodidactic perspective. It focuses on a set of corpora, which might be used in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching: the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the Times Magazine Corpus, the Corpus of Historical American English. The paper presents a definition of the instrumental competence as a coherent cluster of knowledge, skills and abilities necessary for the students to use corpus linguistics technology in foreign language learning. Students are supposed to learn how to work with some basic corpus tools: LIST, KWIC, CHART, COMPARE, COLLOCATE. The author shares personal experience of how to use corpus linguistics technology in foreign language teaching, presents a set of corpus-based exercises and describes the procedure of the learners` work with the basic corpus tools. Using corpus linguistics technology in EFL teaching develops students` critical attitude to English language and facilitates deeper understanding of some linguistic phenomena.

Keywords: BYU corporaconcordancecorpus technologyEFL teachinginstrumental competence

Introduction

Corpus technology has recently presented great potential for plenty of linguistic studies, which fall into some groups: (a) studies on corpus design and methodology (Iruskieta, Diaz de Ilarraza, & Lersundi, 2015; Weisser, 2016), (b) quantitative studies of English lexical and grammatical features (Schmidtke & Kuperman, 2016; López-Couso, 2015), (c) corpus-based studies on linguistic changes (lexical, syntactical and stylistic) (Koplenig, 2018; Perek, 2018), (d) corpus-based discourse analysis (Chernyavskaya, 2017, 2018) .

Some papers have a proper look at the tools of corpus linguistics, for example, concordancer or KWIC (key words in context) and how to use them to solve linguistic issues. For example, Seretan and Wehrli (2013, p. 158) present “an enhanced type of concordancer that integrates syntactic information on sentence structure as well as statistical information on word co-occurrence”.

As we can see above, most of papers are devoted to using corpus technology to solve linguistic issues.

However, we would like to look at corpus linguistics from another angle and focus on linguodidactic potential of corpus technology and its tools.

The advantages of corpus technology for language learning and second language learning are widely presented in the literature (Ackerley, 2017; Kogan, 2016; Leńko-Szymańska, 2017; Pavlovskaya & Gorina, 2017; Rodríguez-Fuentes, 2015; Tarnaeva & Osipova, 2016).

The researchers suggest to use corpus technology for the following purposes: a) as an empirical component of lectures, student assignments and projects; b) to determine the meaning of words and identify differences in usage between synonymous lexical items; c) to study lexical collocations; d) to focus on linguistic evidence that either supports or contradicts the prescriptive grammar rules (Derybina, 2012; Kokoreva, 2013; Kuzminykh & Khoroshilova, 2017; Sosnina, 2017; Sysoyev & Evstigneev, 2014).

The authors see the methodological value of linguistic corpora for some reasons. Firstly, they provide information about the real state of language, its historical, geographical and social variation. Secondly, they illustrate speech registers and genre diversity. Thirdly, they expand understanding of the functions of some language units. Fourthly, they allow to identify the most frequent language phenomena and expand the students` vocabulary (Tarnaeva & Osipova, 2016).

Problem Statement

“Today’s challenging economic situation means that it is no longer sufficient for a new graduate to have knowledge of an academic subject; increasingly it is necessary for students to gain those skills which will enhance their prospects of employment” (Fallows & Steven, 2000, p.75). Taking this fact into consideration universities “have established an initiative to ensure that each of its students engages with these skills and has embedded this within the academic curriculum for all disciplines” (ibid).

The importance of humanitarian subjects for successful employment is in particular highlight. Krepkaia & Mamleeva (2015) conclude that the strong points of humanitarian subjects should be taken into consideration as emotional intelligence, communicative and social competencies developed by them help students to integrate into their professional areas effectively. Almazova & Rubtsova emphasize that liberal arts education is “a key foundation for a personality’s complete development and humanitarian culture, universal humanistic values, personal purport and moral guidelines.” (Almazova & Rubtsova, 2016, p.18).

In the effort to develop some skills that might be helpful for the specialists of the future we offer to use corpus technology in teaching one of the university disciplines – English as a Foreign Language (EFL). EFL is a discipline which is studied by students of all specializations. That is why we can speak about developing universal employability skills, which are necessary for professionals in all spheres. As far as we are concerned, universal employability skills might include the following abilities: independent learning, the retrieval and handling of information (texts, databases, diagrams, schemes, charts), analytical and critical thinking, problem-solving, ability to draw a conclusion etc.

In this article we have a look at corpus linguistics technology, the use of which might contribute to the formation of the universal employability skills.

Research Questions

• Which corpora should be used in EFL teaching?

• What competence should be formed to use corpus linguistics technology in EFL studying?

• What knowledge, skills and abilities must students acquire to use corpus technology?

• Which exercises might help students to acquire the appropriate competence?

Purpose of the Study

The article is written to prove linguodidactic potential of corpus technology in teaching EFL. In this survey we want to share our personal experience how to use corpus linguistics technology in EFL teaching for university students.

Research Methods

Analytic-synthetic methods are used in the search and analysis of literature on the topic; experimental research method is used to identify the linguodidactic potential of corpus technology; modelling method is applied in describing the instrumental competence.

Findings

A set of exercises aimed at the formation of the instrumental competence

The exercise on the formation of the skill to make a query in the search bar correctly

What phrase can NOT be found on the following query in the search bar?

[beat].[v*] * [nn*]

• Beat the Yankees

• Beat about the bush

• Beaten a bill

• Beaten dawn prices

The correct answer is B.

The part of the query [beat].[v*] means that we are looking for any forms of a verb beat. The part of the query * [nn*] means that before a noun only one word is possible. So, the phrase Beat about the bush can not be found on the query, because between a verb and a noun there are two words instead of one.

The exercise on the formation of the ability to work with the LIST tool and the skill to generate a concordance.

Refer to the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), sub-corpus Finance and money. Use the LIST tool and generate the concordances with the prepositions despite, in spite of , and conjunctions although, while, however, nevertheless. Comment on the syntactical features of the prepositions and conjunctions.

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Based on the corpus results (figures 01 , 02 ), the students conclude that after the conjunction although clause is used whereas after the preposition in spite of noun phrase is used.

The exercise on the formation of the ability to work with the CHART tool.

Make a chart of the frequency by genre and year to the phrase Far be it from ?

While studying the “formulaic” subjunctive the students ask if the phrase Far be it from is still used in contemporary English. We don`t give the answer, but ask the students to do the exercise above.

This is the result they get.

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Based on the corpus results, the students come to conclusion that the phrase Far be it from is used in contemporary English and is very common in fiction.

The exercise on the formation of the ability to work with the COMPARE tool.

Use the COMPARE tool and choose the most frequent collocate from the following: it rings hollow/ it rings false?

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From the figure 04 it is obvious, that the most frequent collocate is it rings falls .

The exercise on the formation of the ability to work with the tools COLLOCATE and KWIC

Use the KWIC tool to make a concordance for the preposition “in case”. What preposition does it (“in case”) follow? Use the COLLOCATE tool and analyze the connotation of the expressions with the preposition “in case”.

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Based on the figure 05 the students can easily notice that the preposition of is used after in case . They also pay their attention on the nouns after the preposition in case of . They are war, accident, emergency, danger, disaster, fire. The students conclude that the connotation of the words after in case of is negative. To make sure that it is always true, the students are recommended to use the tool COLLOCATE (figure 06 ). This tool gives the most frequent collocates to a word or a phrase.

After acquiring the basic skills and abilities to work with corpus linguistics technology we offer our students more difficult linguistic tasks.

Examples of the linguistic tasks.

• Are there any differences in meaning between disinterested or uninterested? Are they absolute synonyms?

• Are there any differences in using disinterested / uninterested in context?

To solve the tasks the students are supposed to choose the appropriate corpus linguistics tools themselves and find the way to carry out the corpus search. As for the linguistic tasks given above, the students should use the tool KWIC.

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Based on the corpus results, the students realize that disinterested and uninterested are not the synonyms. Uninterested means not interested in or concerned about something or someone whereas disinterested means not influenced by considerations of personal advantage. Uninterested is usually followed by the preposition in whereas disinterested is followed by a noun.

It is important to emphasize that all the presented above exercises are based on an inductive approach to teaching EFL. It means that some linguistic phenomena are presented to students in a real language context. Such exercises are designed both to engage the students` interest, and to raise students` sensitivity to linguistic features. It is valuable that students can learn to carry out their own investigations.

Conclusion

We absolutely agree with the opinion, that the methodology of corpus linguistics is congenial for students of all levels because it is a "bottom-up" study of the language requiring very little learned expertise to start with. Even the students that come to linguistic enquiry without a theoretical apparatus learn very quickly to advance their hypotheses on the basis of their observations rather than received knowledge and test them against the evidence provided by the corpus (Togini-Bonelli, 2001).

In conclusion, we would like to highlight that the use of corpus linguistics technology in teaching EFL contributes to (a) the development of students ' critical attitude to some linguistic phenomena, (b) the formation of deeper understanding and meaningful use of lexical and grammatical structures, (c) the development of linguistic guess, (d) the correct use of English language according to the genre.

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