This is a special topics course in the Masters in Applied Language Studies. Most of the students taking the course will be involved in ESL teaching, but we typically also have Linguistics students, PhD students, and visitors taking part in the course.

The course text is Susan Hunston's Corpora in Applied Linguistics, which is available in the University Bookshop.

This course  covers the theoretical and practical aspects of using corpora to promote language learning.  A major of the paper  will focus on using corpora and text analysis tools to provide a decription of language as it used by different groups. We could look, for example, at the writing of scientists; the spoken language of London teenagers, or the language of New Zealanders. The aim is increase your knowledge of the nature of language in use and to learn how to use corpora for linguistic investigations.

Once we have a good description of language usage, we can move on to consider language teaching. There are many studies now that  show that the language or grammar depicted in ESL textbooks does not correspond to the language used by native speakers. Since textbooks are pedagogical in nature, their content will never match exactly the language used by native speakers and it is clear that there are many factors involved in the content  of textbooks such as sequencing, repetition, etc. However, the mismatch appears to be due to the combination of a lack of knowledge of language as it is used and an adherence to a ESL textbook tradition of topics to be taught and grammar points to be covered.. The textbook descriptions are not necessarily wrong but the focus is often misplaced. The less frequent words or constructions may be highlighted and more frequent uses ignored.

Having considered the nature of language usage in different genres compared with traditional descriptions, we can examine the issues surrounding the use of corpus-based materials, including concordance lines, in the language classroom. Thus we must take into account the characteristics of the learner and the importance of noticing, awareness, and focus on form in language learning. We will investigate some different lexical approaches to language learning.

Prerequisites

Any discussion of the use of corpora naturally builds on ideas about the nature of language and lamguage learning and so some familiarity with issues in applied language studies is necessary. On the computing side, you should have some basic computer skills, but no programming is required. You will learn how to use simple concordance software.