Corpora made palatable

Piotr Steinbrich is a lecturer at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, where he teaches General English, ELT Methodology and Applied Linguistics. He has co-authored some course books and supplementary materials for Macmillan and Longman. Piotr has been a speaker at various ELT and Applied Linguistics conferences in Europe and South America. He is also a speaker and trainer for DOS, an idependent teacher training organisation in Poland DOS- www.e-dos.org.
E-mail: piotr.steinbrich@vp.pl

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Introduction
About the series
A practical idea

Corpora have been with us for some time and over the last decade or so they have become an invaluable source of linguistic information. Their impact is evident in lexicography and, most recently, in grammar. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English or Cambridge Grammar of English are examples of recently published reference books that adopt the corpus-based approach and boast authentic, as opposed to made-up, examples of real everyday use of English used in a variety of genres and registers. Susan Hunston, in her book Corpora in Applied Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2002), notes that corpora are now used in a number of disciplines, including translation, stylistics, clinical and forensic linguistics, critical discourse studies or in investigating cultural attitudes expressed through language. And although corpus analysis plays an important role in ELT, which is evident in dictionary-making or in some materials that use corpus-driven examples, corpora as such are not particularly popular as lesson-to-lesson classroom resources. Often they are sniffed at as being too technical and of little or no pedagogic value, belonging to the world of linguistic nerds who prefer the sound of their laptop fans to boisterous classrooms, while struggling with the t-scores, z-scores, mutual information, and what have you.

In this series I will try to dispel the myth of corpora being teacher-, learner-, or classroom-unfriendly. In doing so, I will follow the regularly-quoted maxim that materials should not be slaves to corpus findings but should be influenced by them (Summers and Rundell 1995). In other words, I will treat the corpus as a springboard for activities that will be relevant, interesting, dynamic and easy to prepare and implement. I will not be focusing on any particular model of language, language learning/teaching, or acquisition, leaving the ruminations whether language is grammaticalized lexis, lexicalized grammar, or other not-yet-specified quasi-philosophical entity, to the reader. Instead, I will try to do my best in presenting the benefits of using corpora in what is traditionally considered everyday classroom chores we have to face on a day-to-day basis, no matter which level we teach, which method use, which course book we choose, or which part of the world we are in. And although the word chores has negative connotations, which is evidenced by the words it attracts (for example mundane, menial or endless chores) it is used here in a positive sense - as something that, at the end of the day, will result in a relatively flawless performance of our students (note that the collocation classroom chores is not listed as significant in a corpus).

One of the possible applications of corpora is error correction. Knowing that errors are a sign of student progress, we try our best in rooting them out to make this progress faster and more up to scratch. Our students, however, are often impervious to our actions and keep making them, not realizing the effect it may have on the mental condition of their teachers. Errors, of course, will vary, both in quality and type. Here, I would like to look at one kind - prepositional phrases - a highly idiosyncratic feature of any language, thus difficult for the students to use correctly. For that, I will use The Collins WordbanksOnline English corpus, available at http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx . A phrase that seems to be my students' favourite is reason of. Traditional ways of effectively correcting it seem to have failed completely as my learners are still indulging themselves in finding, explaining or discussing various reasons of things that happen. Therefore, believing that multiple exposure to the correct structure may do the job, I asked them to first of all look up the word reason in the corpus and decide which preposition is the most typical. In order to reinforce the use of the correct preposition in the phrase, the students were also asked to write down five randomly chosen sentences with the expression. Next, I asked them to find examples of the use of reason followed by of and … they did! However, all the examples they had included the phrase by reason of. It turned out that studying the concordance sample was not such a bad idea as my students find less and less reasons of things, and these are gradually replaced by reasons for things, with so-much-welcome examples of self-correction whenever reasons of crop up. Moreover, the learners know that the change was caused by reason of corpus analysis, not really realizing that the phrase is characterised by negative semantic prosody, but that is going to be their next assignment. At least, they have been infected by the corpus virus.

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