Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bassexpander]

How useful do you find a corpus to be?

Is it just a sort or neat collection of facts to you, which you might discuss with students from time to time, or is it more?

[tob55]

It is actually much more,

From the stand point of functional language, corpus provides learners with a variety of language inputs used from different situations and settings. It also shows the learner how the language changes depending on whether it is spoken or written.

The possibilities are endless, because the language can literally be molded into any situation or circumstance. I think people use it more than they realized when teaching in the classroom. They just don't know what it is they are actually doing.

[mrsquirrel]

I always find they start to smell a bit if you forget the embalming fluid. I have used soju as a substitute in the past, but I was always worried they would come back to life.

[Juregen]

Could one elaborate on what exactly is meant by a corpus?

[bassexpander]

[Juregen]

I am certainly going to look into it.

[kittykoo]

I have used a corpus in a research job I once had, and recently I found a book called (I think) Discovering academic English, by some Australian, that used a corpus approach to help ESL students distinguish confusing meanings in English: for example, organize and manage, or, expressions such as: in order to and because and since.

There were useful exercises to check that students really could use the words in question, but the real kicker is the concordance, which is a whole page of the word to be studied, including five words before and five words after, as the word appears in modern non-fiction writing. I develop similar pages by taking words the students misuse often in their writing and showing them how they are used by professional writers;

The boys at school like to eat french fries for lunch.
The girls at school like the boys. They say otherwise but they do
If you do not come, like, I will be angry with you.
Children do not react like adults do in the same situation

This works really well for teaching connective expressions and other types of words that do not exist in students native languages.

[SeoulMan6]

Some textbooks are corpus-based. But outside of that I haven't used it in class.

I tried to get a copy of a corpus, but found it hard / expensive. Anyone know of how to get a copy?

[kittykoo]

http://corpus.byu.edu/time/

This website is a 100 million word corpus from Time magazine.

[robot]

I use them occasionally when trying to fully understand the usage of a word, or the subtle differences in usages between words.

I've introduced corpuses to my adult students when I was teaching back in Canada as part of a unit on collocations. But it was less for their practical use and more to inspire them with the beauty and patterns of English, and the wealth of learning resources at their disposal.

I do, however, make very good use of my dog-eared Oxford Collocations dictionary