Re-reading my master’s thesis years after writing it has given me insight into my current teaching practices. Here I describe some of the background of my thesis, briefly cover some of my findings, and then focus on my particular interest in cultivating learner autonomy through the use of corpora and corpus-based activities. Finally, I discuss the role of graduate school and the thesis process in shaping my ideas of teaching best practices.

It is generally agreed that using corpus linguistics in the classroom increases learner autonomy, enhances accurate representation of language, and raises cultural understanding in the language classroom. When learners use naturally occurring tasks, naturally occurring texts, and naturally occurring discourse, corpus-based activities create an environment in which mediation and analysis involve them more actively in their learning. Corpora provide actual samples from written and spoken English that took place in real communication situations, and lists of collocations found by searching a corpus can highlight the use of a word, what part of speech it is most commonly used as, and the tendency of the search term toward particular word clusters or lexical chunks. For my graduate research project, titled Exploring Language Corpora With Adult Learners: A Study of Learner Response to a Corpus-Based Modal Verb Activity, I utilized a hands-on corpus-based activity in a community college classroom of adult ESL students. I focused on how studying modal verbs in a corpus-based activity could inform low-intermediate-level learners’ understanding of modal verb forms as well as the students’ personal reactions to working with a concordancer to search for modals in a corpus. Specifically, the participants (21 ESL students from 14 countries at Portland Community College [PCC], Rock Creek Campus) used MonoConc software to search Longman’s American English Conversation corpus for examples of the four verbs can, could, will, and would. These modals were chosen because they are the most common modal verbs used in conversational English (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999) and students were familiar with them. At the time of my study in 2004, little research had been conducted with lower level community college students and hands-on corpus search activities.

I used criticisms of and questions from classroom corpus research to formulate my research questions. Generally, I examined how the components of time, difficulty of activity, student level and age, and student computer comfort score played a role in the success of the two class sessions during which the students conducted corpus-search activities. My research design included a pre-activity with demographic survey (from which I determined students’ computer comfort scores), introduction to concordancing activity, hands-on corpus modal verbs activity, and a post-activity survey (from which I gathered students’ opinions) to answer the following research questions:

1. To what extent can students at a low-intermediate level successfully complete tasks using a concordancer to search for particular words in a corpus? More specifically, how do they make generalizations about the use of the modal verbs can, could, will, and would in American English conversation from their concordance searches?
2. What are students’ attitudes toward working with corpora to discover uses of these modals, and what aspects of working with corpora do they report liking and disliking in follow-up surveys to the corpus-based task?
3. Is there a relationship between students’ attitudes toward using corpora and their reported comfort with using computers in general?

Most of my findings supported the use of corpora in the classroom. Although some students were not able to define the use of a modal verb from examples they found in the corpus, many were creative in coming up with a definition of modal verb use. When a student created an illustrative sentence, it was apparent because of the unidiomatic syntax and the way the student established a scenario, for example, “Today you have a no work but your boss asking can you come to work today. that time I will tell I can come today.” This method of creating a definition for the modal can showed a high level of student analysis: The student had to first determine how the modal verb was used in the corpus examples and then create a similar situation for the modal verb use. For the verb would one student wrote, “When I ask something politly, about possible thinking,” and for could, “I saw that it is most used in posibilities.” Overall, 81% of the 21 participants scored 75% or better on completing the task in which they searched for the modal words separately, wrote examples they found of the modal word in context, and wrote their interpretation of the modal word’s meaning. Similarly, 76% of the answers in the modal verbs activity showed a student’s attempt to define the modal use by providing additional sentences from the search, creating illustrative example sentences, defining one or more use for the modal verb, or creating a (not always clear) definition.

As participant responses from the post-activity surveys showed, the in-class modal verb corpus activity was well received. Most students felt that using the corpus was interesting, that they discovered something new about modal verb use, that they would like to look at words in a corpus again, and that they liked looking at many examples. One student commented, “This program is for language explorers,” which was interesting because researchers in favor of the use of corpus linguistics in language learning argue that language exploration is one reason to use corpus-based activities with language learners.

My study revealed several phenomena that had not yet been recorded in the research 9 years ago. First, in a group of 21 adult ESL learners from a variety of backgrounds, most students were capable of utilizing a corpus and concordancer to analyze the use of modal verbs in this activity. Second, despite a common opinion among these participants that the concordancer demonstration went too quickly, the majority of the students were not discouraged in their attempts to productively complete the activity. Finally, although factors of computer experience and ease of use played a small role in student opinions of the activity, the majority of participants reported enjoying aspects of the activity regardless of their computer experience. Students wrote a variety of positive comments, such as “I would like doing mor,” “This activity show us many exemplos for learn more about English ¿wen can get a CD for us? Thank you,” and “I like learning English with computer. Speaking corpus. I need more time to look for various words. And I want to use corpus at home!” On the other hand, the one negative comment spoke to the lack of variety in the activity: “I will like to use PCC software to learn English more than it. because it has pictures, and speaking, reading, writing, practice, it is more interesting.” Most students agreed that there were too many examples to look at from their returned queries, but they also agreed that they liked looking at many examples of modal verbs.

Since the completion of my master’s program and thesis project, I have used different levels of corpus-based material in the classroom and have generally sought ways to encourage students to become language explorers. With the advent of readily available online corpora, such as Mark Davies’s (1990–2012) Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), students can skip the steps of buying a corpus, uploading it to their computer, and installing concordancing software. I have had higher level grammar students search for different forms using COCA. This exercise included a pre–computer lab explanation of what a corpus and concordancer are with a demonstration, and was followed by a highly scaffolded hands-on corpus activity focusing on a search of a few words. I found this especially successful when they searched for phrasal verbs and the prepositions/particles they collocate with. Students could discover from looking at the corpus examples whether a phrasal verb was separable or inseparable and began to notice the nuanced meanings represented in corpus search results. With lower level students, I have used word/verb-of-the-day activities where I find three examples of a word’s different usages and write them on the board, eliciting student ideas of word meaning. I have often selected words or phrases that I find students struggling with, for example go back (meaning to return). For this activity I have also written the most common collocations on the board, which often showed (rather than telling students) the words’ part of speech as well as important cultural information.

Time and again students tell me they want to learn “natural sounding English,” that is, they want to be able to use natural phrases, grammar, collocations, and vocabulary spontaneously as a native speaker does. Instructors do students a disservice if they do not present collocations and the most common uses of words when teaching new vocabulary. I mostly discovered this through my graduate studies, but it has been reinforced in actual classroom experience.

Although much of my cohort during graduate school and I balked at the requirement of the thesis project, the act of planning and implementing a such a project obligated us to examine what we believed learning really is. I would argue that the differences in teaching style that we discover among colleagues are in large part due to the pedagogical frameworks within which we learned during graduate school. As different learning methods go in and out of style, I try to keep in mind that best practices at a given point in time reflect these preferences. But whatever the specific method, the key is the understanding that increasing students’ interest in discovering language increases their intrinsic motivation and in turn their autonomy as learners.

At the meta-level, my graduate school training and thesis project influenced my overall belief in what H. Douglas Brown (2002) outlines explicitly in his 12 language learning principles, which he believes should influence our teaching, as a counter to solely relying on specific teaching methodologies: automaticity, meaningful learning, the anticipation of reward, intrinsic motivation, strategic investment, language ego, self-confidence, risk-taking, the language-culture connection, the native language effect, interlanguage, and communicative competence. Brown concludes that the century-old struggle of trying to find the quintessential language teaching methodology should be replaced with the idea of using these principles to guide our teaching. Even my German high school teacher, who utilized a methodology emphasizing automaticity, sought to increase student intrinsic motivation and knowledge of the language-culture connection by emphasizing how fun it was to learn a language and to travel to other countries. Although I employ some different and some similar techniques as my German teacher did, ultimately I reflect on my thesis project and see the connections in how I continue to teach with the goal of inspiring learner autonomy.

References

Barlow, M. (2000). MonoConc Pro 2.0 [Computer software]. Houston, TX: Athelston.

Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Essex, England: Pearson Education.

Brown, H. D. (2002). English language teaching in the “post-method” era: Toward better diagnosis, treatment, and assessment. In W. Renandya & J. Richards (Eds.), Methodology of language teaching: An anthology of current practice (pp. 9–18). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Davies, M. (1990–2012). The corpus of contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Retrieved from http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Melanie Jipping is currently an adjunct ESOL instructor in the American Studies Program at Tokyo International University of America, in Salem, Oregon, and has taught at a variety of institutions, including other liberal arts–based programs, intensive English programs, and community colleges since 2003. After 2 years of experience as the ORTESOL Newsletter editor from 2008 to 2010, she is looking forward to her new position as TESOL’s HEIS Newsletter book review editor starting in 2013.