Kim Young-Ah
IBLT, Week 7
Tracking learners’ actual uses of corpora (Perez-Paredes, 2011)
This study is about how learners’ interaction with corpus-based resources is changed under different corpus consultation conditions which are the guided and non-guided. 37 EFL students, native Spanish speakers, were studied. They were divided into 2 groups. One of them was CG which 15 students finished their task without clear directions on how to use a corpus, and the other was EG which 22 students was provided with corpus consultation guidance. The result is that EG students used a similar amount of browser events as CG ones. However, CG used these online resources to a lesser extent than EG. EG also branched out and used more resources at the sam! e time than CG. Even though EG finished fewer activities, they used the BNC almost three times more than CG. In short, the 2 groups used resources differently about how many different websites they visited and how often they performed BNMC searches. (Perez-Paredas, 2011) Accordingly, skills and guidance are necessary when a corpus is taken to the class. (Mauranen, 2004)
As a teacher of elementary school students, I often ask my students to use a naver or its dictionary in order to find the uses of words and expressions that they don’t know. When searching on Naver, they can use both Korean and English, which is easy and convenient for Korean children. I think that for students, searching online by themselves without just asking others is another way to study and learn language better. In this sense, Perez-Paredas’s study makes me feel that my role to give a better online resource and teach how to use it is important.
The potential of corpus-informed L2 pedagogy (Reinhardt, 2010)
Even though corpus linguistics have not greatly influenced on L2 teaching, corpus keeps having impact on SLA researchers and pedagogical innovators. Also, computer development has resulted in corpus linguistics’ extension. However, corpus informed materials, corpus analysis tools, and well-designed corpora should be simply more numerous, accessible and user friendly, and preferably web-based in order to have more influence on L2 teaching (Reinhardt, 2010). Here are some suggestions towards effecting some changes that are applicable to all L2 pedagogy. First, corpus linguists should get language educators to research and understand results for L2 educational implications. Sec! ond, the results and approaches should be integrated into pedagogical curriculum and materials steadily, rather than be presented as panaceas. Third, corpus-informed techniques should be integrated into other approaches. Finally, for real change, teachers should be willing to be away from traditional approaches to grammar teaching (Conard, 2000).
After this article, I feel that contextualization of corpus data is a good inductive technique for teaching, but it takes long for teachers to teach, and for students to understand. Actually, most teachers including me are not familiar with this corpus-based teaching, so I wonder if we can use this method in general, and if we can effectively apply it to children or adults in low level.
Comparison and Contrast
The two articles agree that corpus-based learning and teaching are helpful for L2 development. Also, the articles focused on the importance of L2 teachers’ role. According to them, when using corpus linguistics to the classroom, teachers’ role and guidance are very important. Perez-Paredas’ study corroborated the suggestion through an experiment. In its experiment, learners under the guided-condition diversified and used more resources simultaneously than those under the non-guided one. Otherwise, in Reinhardt’s, Conard suggests that teachers should try to use corpus-informed technique with other approaches by being away from traditional deductive! teaching. Moreover, she emphasized the potential of corpus-informed L2 pedagogy with additional suggestions.
Clarification question: In Reinhardt’s, I want to clarify “see grammar as register-specific rather than monolithic”. What is register specificity exactly?
Application question: 1) How can young students or adults in low level develop L2 skills through corpus linguistics? When they find some words, chunks, or phrases in corpus tools, but they don’t understand the contexts including those things, how can they get to know the meanings and uses of them?
