Amanda Hilliard, Hue University College of Foreign Language, Hue, Vietnam

Since the development of the first computerized corpus in the 1960s, the growing field of corpus linguistics has revolutionized the way we study, view, and research language data. However, despite their immense potential, corpora—or large, computerized collections of texts—are still being underused in English language teaching and materials development (Gavioli, 2005, pp. 1–2; Mukherjee, 2006, pp. 6–7). This is especially disappointing when one considers the impact and influence of corpus analysis in other fields.

This article highlights simple ways that even teachers with little or no experience using corpora can begin using this powerful tool to improve their language teaching abilities. Examples and exercises for this article were created using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies, 2008) because it is easy to use, has a 5-minute tutorial, and is available online for free (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca); however, the tips and suggestions here could be applied to any corpus.

Get a Frequency List

Frequency lists are useful because speakers often have vague notions about the relative frequency of different words and can be led astray by their intuition or common sense. For example, take a minute and write down what you think are the five most frequent words in English. If you wrote down examples like woman, dog, or child, you might be surprised to find these words are not even in the top 100. (Find the answer here: www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y).

COCA already has premade lists, but because not all of these resources are free, you may prefer to create your own list. For example, if you’re teaching a speaking class and you want students to sound more fluent and natural, you might encourage them to use more interjections in their speaking, but how do you decide which ones to teach? Searching the spoken section of COCA, you can find the top 20 interjections and create an activity for your speaking class, such as the following:

Activity A: Look at the following chart and answer the questions about the interjections (some words may be used more than once):

1. Which words can be used to show agreement? Which words can be used to show disagreement?
2. Which words can be used to greet someone?
3. Which words can be used to show surprise?
4. Which words can be used to show confusion?

Activity B: Write a short dialogue with a partner using at least five of the words from the chart.

Create Authentic Materials

Communicative language teaching encourages the use of authentic language, and teachers can use corpora to ensure that their teaching materials are based on real English examples. For example, suppose you want to teach phrasal verbs that include the word hand. Using the corpus, you search for hand + a preposition and come up with the following activity, completely based on authentic, real-life examples taken from COCA.

Activity C: What do the phrasal verbs hand in, hand out, hand over, and hand down mean? Can you fill in the blanks below with in, out, over, down?

1. Relatives of Halabja victims cheered in the courtroom when chief judge Aboud Mustafa handed ________ the guilty verdict against al-Majid.

2. I made a few phone calls and a couple of visits and handed ________ a story less than a week later.

3. Handing ________ assignments late was OK at the beginning of the year, she says, but teachers took marks off for it in term two.

4. The grant was one of 20 handed ________ in 2009 to boost college support for veterans.

5. There were no doctors or nurses, and traditional treatments were handed ________ from one generation to the next.

6. Even tougher on Kate had been handing ________ their poodle, Stella, to the ex because he'd ended up in a place more suitable for dog ownership and the court had awarded him guardianship.

7. Throughout it all, restaurants like mine were allowed to run a booth where we handed ________ coupons and free samples, and sold our signature espressos.

8. Now Colt came back to the major abruptly and handed ________ the gun, very aware of how faded and dusty his uniform was.

As with the frequency lists above, teachers may be surprised by the most common meanings and uses of vocabulary, phrases, or grammatical structures. Focusing on a classroom environment, many teachers might not have considered using hand out andhand in with items like coupons or grants. Or you may have thought about using hand over to talk about a weapon, but probably not to talk about losing your pet poodle in a divorce settlement. Using genuine examples from corpus data allows teachers to expose students to a greater variety of authentic materials.

Find Collocates

Perhaps one of the most common uses of corpora is to search for collocations, or co-occurrences of words. Because even speakers with a near-perfect command of English can be identified as nonnatives by small mistakes in their choice of words, it is vital that learners are exposed to information about collocation and phraseology in order to develop an expert, fluent command of the language (Lindquist, 2009, p. 71).

For example, if students often confuse make and do, you could use the corpus to find noun collocations following these verbs and come up with the following exercise in which students must distinguish between objects that collocate with make and objects that collocate with do. Furthermore, even though some words can be matched with either verb, with corpus data you can explain that they appear more commonly with one of the verbs.

Activity D: Fill in the chart to show which of the following words go with the verbs below. When you finish, write an example sentence using make and one of the words and another sentence using do and one of the words. (Hint: Some words may be used with either verb.)

mistake, sense, homework, effort, decision, nothing, repetitions, housework, changes, business, work, choices, possible, living

Find Grammar Patterns

Corpus research has led to an emphasis on the connection between lexis and grammar, and the identification of different grammar patterns associated with different lexical items (Hunston & Francis, 2000, pp. 28–29). Most corpora today include part of speech (pos) tags, so it’s possible to search by a specific part of speech rather than for a specific word when investigating grammar patterns. Below is an example of an activity created by searching for different adjectives + a preposition + a gerund.

Activity E: Fill in the blanks below with one of these prepositions: of, about, in, by. Then, write two of your own sentences using this pattern: adjective + preposition + gerund.

1. Good news for those of you tired ______ waiting on long lines in the grocery store or just about any business, for that matter.

2. I remember getting excited ______ going to see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center.

3. They were often too scared ______ losing jobs to press for safer working conditions, advocates say.

4. I get bored ______ looking at the same thing.

5. She was happy, as she always is, excited ______ having the baby.

6. The meeting is for rising juniors and seniors interested ______ doing some or all of their remaining classes at a college.

7. That way, you won't be overwhelmed ______ having to share your story again and again.

8. He's truly uninterested ______ talking about his own career.

Answer Student Questions (or Your Own Questions)

Students are always asking questions about grammar, vocabulary, writing style, or something else. Many times we may struggle to come up with the answer, a good explanation, or suitable examples on the spot. Using a corpus can be an effective way to find information about language structure and use. Once you find the word, grammar pattern, or other information in the corpus, it is easy to develop materials and classroom activities from the corpus examples. Furthermore, rather than just giving students one or two poor example sentences to address their question, you can give them dozens or hundreds of authentic examples.

Conclusion

As with any new technology, corpus use requires an initial investment of time spent learning how to initiate corpus searches, but with a little practice, teachers will find that corpora can be a valuable tool in improving their teaching materials and skills. From informing materials development and language description to providing authentic language data to supplying answers to questions, corpora have many potential uses in the classroom. Hopefully the simple corpus-driven examples shown here will encourage you to go to the COCA website (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/), take the tutorial, and start using COCA or another corpus for your own classes.

References

Davies, M. (2008). The corpus of contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990–present. Retrieved from http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

Gavioli, L. (2005). Exploring corpora for ESP learning. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Hunston, S., & Francis, G. (2000). Pattern grammar: A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Lindquist, H. (2009). Corpus linguistics and the description of English. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.

Mukherjee, J. (2006). Corpus linguistics and language pedagogy (p.5 - 24): The state of the art—and beyond. In S. Braun, K. Kohn, & J. Mukherjee (Eds.), Corpus technology and language pedagogy. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang.

Amanda Hilliard, a native of the United States, received her MA TEFL/TESL from the University of Birmingham, in England, in 2011 and is currently a PhD student in the Applied Linguistics Department. She has more than 5 years of teaching experience and works at Hue University College of Foreign Language, in Hue, Vietnam, as part of the English Language Fellow Program run by the U.S. State Department.