Supporting Students’ Noticing of Academic Language Patterns through Corpus Data

Eman Elturki, USA

Eman Elturki has a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Technology from Washington State University. She teaches ESL and serves at the Curriculum and Materials Coordinator at the Intensive American Language Center of Washington State University. Elturki is interested in corpus-based pedagogy, SLA, and L2 teaching and learning. E-mail: eman.elturki@wsu.edu

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Introduction
Corpus resources for academic language
How can teachers facilitate the development of academic language?
References

Introduction

Mastering academic language is challenging and requires explicit and repeated exposure to academic language patterns. Corpora can assist in building learners’ repertoire of academic language and improving their spoken and written competencies. This paper shares corpus resources for academic language and reflects on the integration of corpora in the classroom.

Research on learner corpora has shown that English as a second language (L2) learners’ writing is highly affected by spoken discourse, as it tends to reflect a recurrent use of language sequences that are highly frequent in spoken register (e.g. Elturki, 2015; Gilquin & Paquot, 2008). To build L2 learners’ repertoire of academic language and, ultimately, achieve ease and fluency in the retrieval and production of academic language formulas (e.g. it should be noted that), this paper highly urges language teachers to ensure that learners receive repeated exposure to academic formulas. It recommends some corpus tools that provide access to academic language and reflects on how teachers can integrate corpus resources in their teaching.

Corpus resources for academic language

Online corpus resources offer the tools that assist in building language learners’ repertoire of academic language and, eventually, improving their spoken and written competencies. Through the integration of corpora in language teaching and learning, learners get exposure to authentic language and develop knowledge of lexico-grammatical patterns by inductively exploring what multiple examples of specific utterances have in common.

The following table lists valuable corpus resources that provide access to authentic examples of academic language in use. These resources are publically available online, have a user-friendly interface with a built-in concordance, and accessed directly without signing-up for an account (except COCA after running multiple searches).

Table: Corpus Resources for Academic Language

How can teachers facilitate the development of academic language?

Working with adult language learners, I have found it specifically effective to use an inductive approach to notice and comprehend corpus data. My philosophy is that adult learners’ mature cognitive systems enable them to inductively recognize language patterns. They need the opportunity to examine multiple instances of the investigated patterns and their use in context. This can be systematically done through following a specific process when teaching academic language sequences consisting of noticing, retrieving, and generating (Hatami, 2015). To explain, a word sequence can be noticed by students when it is salient in context. Thus, to facilitate the acquisition of academic patterns, the teacher needs to ensure their saliency in the teaching materials. Students also need multiple opportunities for receptive and productive retrievals of language sequences (i.e. in listening, reading, speaking, and writing). Targeted sequences need to be encountered in listening and reading and produced in speaking and writing to achieve both the noticing and retrieval of lexical items. Finally, students need to use a language sequence generatively by extending its meaning using different grammatical patterns. This process can by supported through making use of free academic corpus resources as they “provide the opportunity for numerous encounters with a lexical item in various contexts and help to reveal its typical usage” (Hatami, 2015, p. 124). They indubitably reflect the high frequent formulaic sequences produced by the language users of the academic domain, and “[i]f a pattern becomes very frequent in use across very large quantities of text, then it becomes ‘entrenched’ as part of the system” (Stubbs, 2007, p. 127). Learners need to be scaffolded during the discovery process through posing questions that eventually lead to drawing conclusions about the investigated language pattern and its usages. In my opinion, such a process is empowering to language learners because it provokes critical thinking and inductive reasoning and, eventually, promotes consciousness raising and learner autonomy. In the same vein, Hyland (2008) recommends “encouraging learners to notice […] multi-word units through repeated exposure and through activities such as matching and item identification” (20). He continues to say that “[c]onsciousness raising tasks […] offer opportunities to retrieve, use and manipulate items can be productive, as can activities which require learners to produce the items in their extended writing” (Hyland, 2008, p. 20).

The pedagogical inclusion of corpora in the ESL classroom can be ‘direct’ and/or ‘indirect’. In direct corpus use, learners get coached to access and explore language use through corpus platforms. In indirect corpus use, on the other hand, teachers use corpus data to inform instruction about frequency of occurrences and typical usages of language patterns and can also design concordance-based exercises.

As an ESL teacher, I have utilized corpus resources to inform my teaching and enrich the curriculum. I have also trained my students in advanced composition classes to directly and independently use free academic writing corpora. I have used corpus tools both directly and indirectly. In upper level academic writing classes, I train my students to use corpus resources inside and outside the classroom to ensure they receive sufficient exposure to academic language. For example, in a recent upper level composition class, I made both StringNet and MICUSP main components of the class to support building students’ inventory of academic formulaic sequences. They used them directly and independently to explore the language of argumentation and critique which were the main focus in this composition class. Weekly corpus tasks were assigned outside the classroom using a closed Facebook group to maintain an extended learning of academic language in an engaging and collaborative manner. Tasks included exploring and noticing how the writers in the academic domain use specific constructions to write about arguments, counterarguments, and refutations. The students also used these tools in the editing process for grammar and syntax. As for the indirect corpus use, I have adopted corpus data to create grammar, writing, and theme-based writing exercises, specifically in lower classes, to bring relevant and authenic real-world discourse into the L2 classroom.

To sum up, free online corpora are valuable resources that can be utilized to build L2 learners’ repertoire of academic language and to help them, ultimately, become proficient speakers and writers of English.

References

Elturki, E. (2015). The development of formulaic sequences: a longitudinal learner corpus investigation (Doctoral dissertation). Available from Dissertations & Theses @ Washington State University WCLP.

Gilquin, G., & Paquot, M. (2008). Too chatty: Learner academic writing and register variation. English Text Construction, 1(1), 41-61.

Hatami, S. (2015). Teaching formulaic sequences in the ESL classroom. TESOL Journal, 6(1), 112-129.

Hyland, K. (2008). As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for specific purposes, 27(1), 4-21.

Stubbs, M. (2007). On texts, corpora and models of language. In M. Hoey et al. (Ed.), Text, discourse and corpora: Theory and analysis (pp. 127-161). London: Continuum.

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