What impressed me most in today's class was the demonstration and discussion about corpora for language learning. I was amazed not only by the sheer amount of information available in a corpus but also how easy it was in fact for people to use. Besides vocabulary learning demonstrated in class, I could instantly think of so many other ways to utilize a corpus for language learning. With the "context" providing source discourses, students could practice their reading skills; the "collocation" search would definitely be helpful for grammar learning and writing practice; corpora covering or dedicated to spoken language not only could be used for researches but also may come in handy in students' oral language production; and the display of different usages of a particular word could be such a valuable resource for translation practice. However, as what we have been reminded time after time, we should never lose sight of the characteristics of language learners at a particular level. I was wondering, besides corpora created for different languages, genres, or geographical locations, is there any corpus designed for language learners of a specific level?
3 comments:
Hi Rong,
I'm glad that you found the COCA corpus tool to be useful. I found it a bit overwhelming, but it makes sense for language learning. I like how students can find the word in news, magazines, and academic articles. This helps students better understand when and how to use the word and this is much more useful than just memorizing words or connecting words with pictures. Thanks for sharing your ideas about how to use corpus as a learning tool.
Hi Rong,
Too bad I missed class last week! I heard about the usefulness of corpus before. There's also Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. It contains 250,000 spoken American English. It's based on hundreds of recordings of spontaneous speech from across the US, including speakers from different regions, ages, occupations, and ethnic and social backgrounds. It contains spoken language in daily use. I think it has to be purchased for use. But I heard that there are other corpus data some of which are free!
Hi Rong,
I enjoyed reading your post. I also find the corpus very helpful. In responding to your question, I've been thinking about what kinds of materials could be used for building a corpus that targets learners in a specific level, especially elementary level. How about readings that are designed for children? But of course our learners are very likely to be adults.And still, even if native children lack reading and writing skills and cognitive abilities, they are, in many aspects, more proficient than our elementary level adult learners in the target language. It is indeed very challenging.
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