Corpora and language education.doc

Corpora and language educationRichard Xiao, Tony McEneryLancaster University(2005 manuscript) Abstract: Corpus linguistics as a methodology of linguistics research has gained such prominence over time that corpora have been used extensively in nearly all branches of linguistics. This article explores, through a series of studies undertaken so far, the potential uses of corpus data in one of these areas C language education. We will discuss a wide range of issues related to using corpora in language pedagogy, including syllabus design, materials development, data-driven learner (DLL), teaching language for specific purposes, language testing, teacher training as well as learner corpus and interlanguage analysis.Key words: corpora, language pedagogy, data-driven learning, learner corpus, interlanguage analysis1. IntroductionThe corpus-based approach to linguistics and language education has gained prominence over the past four decades, particularly since the mid-1980s. This is because corpus analysis can be illuminating ‘in virtually all branches of linguistics or language learning’ (Leech 1997: 9; cf. also Biber et al 1998: 11). One of the strengths of corpus data lies in its empirical nature, which pools together the intuitions of a great number of speakers and makes linguistic analysis more objective (McEnery and Wilson 2001: 103). Nowadays, corpora have had such a strong influence on recent reference publishing (at least for English, e.g. Sinclair et al 1990; Francis et al 1996, 1998; Biber et al 1999) that ‘even people who have never heard of a corpus are using the product of corpus-based investigation’ (Hunston 2002: 96). Hunston summarizes the changes brought about by corpora to dictionaries and other reference books in terms of five ‘emphases’: an emphasis on frequency, an emphasis on collocation and phraseology, an emphasis on variation, an emphasis on lexis in grammar and an emphasis on authenticity (ibid). In addition to reference publishing, corpo