Corpora and Grammar Teaching

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Corpora and Grammar Teaching

• Andrew Wilson

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Types of corpus

• Corpora can be either monolingual or multilingual
  
• General language corpora e.g. BNC
• Specialized (LSP) corpora e.g. HKUST
• Learner corpora e.g. PELCRA
• Appropriate comparators?

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Corpus-based book materials

• Reference grammars dictionaries
• Pedagogical grammars (e.g. CGE)
• But how far are they corpus-based?
• Data books (e.g. COBUILD)

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Internet grammars

• Monolingual (e.g. UCL Internet Grammar)
• Not very corpus-oriented
• Bilingual (e.g. Chemnitz Internet Grammar)
• Bilingual corpus base
• Explanations focussed on L1 problems
• Routes through the grammar
• Exercises

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Syllabus design

• What are the most frequent native-speaker
  options?
• Should these be taught first?
• Work by Dieter Mindt in Germany

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Classroom concordancing

• Student as researcher
• Guided discovery learning
• Ties in with newer cognitive theories of LL
• BUT How do the students actually respond?

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CALL programs

• Cytor grammar tutor
• Internet grammar exercises

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Further reading

• http//www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/andrew/cpg.htm