Corpus Tools for Learning and Research (week 4)

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Introduction

What is a 'corpus' (pl corpora)???

Corpus refer to the collection of a single writer's work or of writing about a particular subject, or a large amount of written and sometimes spoken material collected to show the state of a language. In simple means, corpus refers to a collection of words used in a language. (Cambridge dictionary).

What is a concordance??? How it relates to corpus?? What does a concordance do that a dictionary can't??

Concordance refer to a book or list which is an alphabetical collection of the words used in a book or a writer's work, with information about where the words can be found and in which sentences.
( Cambridge dictionary). This relates to corpus since concordance software is used to see a corpus.

The advantages of using a concordance more then a dictionary are:
  1. shows word usage 'as it really is'.Authentic examples.
  2. shows common collocations/combinations
  3. can identify subtle associations and connotations 
  4. can highlight culturally-specific meaning 
  5. shows language patterns and word grammar

Conclusion,corpus is the study of language established on examples of real life language use stored in corpora computerised databases invented for language research.

There are plenty of online corpora such as the Collins Cobuild,the British National Corpus and the BYU Interface. The link sources are attached below:Just click them!!

http://www.xmarks.com/site/www.collins.co.uk/corpus/CorpusSearch.asp
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

The main focus here is on the British National Corpus because it is one of the most outstanding corpus used among teachers and learners. This educational website certainly makes the teaching and learning in English language more comprehensible.This technology is suitable for all  levels of students. This website brings in the idea of corpus based teaching and learning approach in language. This website offers
a 100 million!!! word collection of samples of real life language, chosen to be as varied as possible in its coverage. It includes speech as well as a wide variety of different kinds of written language, all chosen from the same time.



Instructions

How do teachers and learners go about using this website? Don't worry, the steps are briefly described below:
  1. type British National Corpus in the google search engine.
  2. click the link http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
  3. once in the page you can see a box written 'search the corpus'.
  4. there will be a 'look up' and type the word in the box and press 'go'.
  5. the alphabets in the left indicates where the sentences are taken from.
  6. the numbers indicates the frequency of usage of a word.



Additionally, there is an example activity below:



The advantages of using corpora are:
  1. not just only one teacher or experts opinion but can consider many teachers and experts opinions in learning language.
  2. its based on evidence more better than guesswork and intuition
  3. describes authentic (native) language use
  4. encourage autonomous learning 

The disadvantages of using corpora are:
  1. to many information and needs filtration
  2. corpus bias
  3. hard to identify the most suitable corpus since there are to many corpora as well depends on the reliability of the sources used to make it

Recommendation

Teachers can use corpus to design syllabus and course planning.Teachers can also use corpus to develop teaching materials and plan classroom activities. Teachers can also use concordance in class.


ReferencesforthepictureisCorpusTools.com
Referecencesforthe sources
:xmarks.com,
natcorp.ukand
corpu.byu.
eduandearly
dailydoesesofEnglishyoutubechannel

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