From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use and Language Teaching

by Anne O'Keeffe , Michael McCarthy , Ronald Carter

• ISBN13: 9780521616867
• ISBN10: 0521616867
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-05-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

From Corpus to Classroom summarises and makes accessible recent work in corpus research, focusing particularly on spoken data. It is based on analysis of corpora such as CANCODE and Cambridge International Corpus, and written with particular reference to the development of corpus-informed pedagogy. The book explains how corpora can be designed and used, and focuses on what they tell us about language teaching. It examines the relevance of corpora to materials writers, course designers and language teachers and considers the needs of the learner in relation to authentic data. It shows how the answers to key questions such as 'Is there a basic, everyday vocabulary for English?', 'How should idioms be taught?' and 'What are the most common spoken language chunks?' are best explored by means of a clearer understanding of the workings of language in context.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. v
Preface	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Introduction: the basics	p. 1
What is a corpus and how can we use it?	p. 1
Which corpus, what for and what size?	p. 3
How to make a basic corpus	p. 5
Basic corpus linguistic techniques	p. 8
Lexico-grammatical profiles	p. 14
How have corpora been used?	p. 17
How have corpora influenced language teaching?	p. 21
Issues and debates in the use of corpora in language teaching	p. 25
Establishing basic and advanced levels in vocabulary learning	p. 31
Introduction	p. 31
Frequency and native-speaker vocabulary size	p. 31
The most frequent words and the core vocabulary	p. 33
The broad categories of a basic vocabulary	p. 37
Chunks at the basic level	p. 46
The basic level: conclusion	p. 46
The advanced level	p. 47
Targets	p. 48
The vocabulary curve	p. 49
The 6,000 to 10,000 word band	p. 50
Meanings and connotations	p. 53
Breadth and depth	p. 54
Lessons from the analysis of chunks	p. 58
Introduction	p. 58
The single word	p. 58
Collocation	p. 59
Strings of words in corpora	p. 60
Phraseology and idiomaticity	p. 62
Looking at corpus data	p. 64
Interpreting the data: chunks and single words	p. 69
Chunks and units of interaction	p. 70
Conclusions and implications	p. 75
Idioms in everyday use and in language teaching	p. 80
Introduction	p. 80
Finding and classifying idioms	p. 82
Frequency	p. 84
Meaning	p. 86
Functions of idioms	p. 87
Idioms in specialised contexts	p. 90
Idioms in teaching and learning	p. 94
Grammar and lexis and patterns	p. 100
Introduction	p. 100
The example of border	p. 102
Grammar rules and patterns: deterministic and probabilistic	p. 104
The get-passive: an extended case study	p. 106
Previous studies of the get-passive	p. 106
Get-passives and related forms	p. 108
Core get-passive constructions in the CANCODE sub-corpus	p. 109
Discussion	p. 113
Grammar as structure and grammar as probabilities: the example of ellipsis	p. 114
Conclusions and implications	p. 115
Grammar, discourse and pragmatics	p. 120
Introduction	p. 120
Non-restrictive which-clauses	p. 120
Previous studies of which-clauses	p. 122
Concordance analysis of which-clauses	p. 122
If-clauses	p. 127
Wh-cleft clauses	p. 130
Bringing the insights together	p. 136
Corpus grammar and pedagogy	p. 137
Listenership and response	p. 140
Introduction	p. 140
Forms of listenership	p. 142
Response tokens across varieties of English	p. 145
Functions of response tokens	p. 148
Conclusions and implications	p. 155
Relational language	p. 159
Introduction	p. 159
Conversational routines	p. 163
Small talk	p. 168
Discourse markers	p. 171
Hedging	p. 174
Vagueness and approximation	p. 176
Conclusions and implications	p. 181
Language and creativity: creating relationships	p. 184
Introduction	p. 184
Spoken language and creativity	p. 184
Corpora and creativity	p. 188
Creative speakers	p. 190
Applications to pedagogy	p. 191
Corpus to pedagogy: creating relationships	p. 192
SUEs and creativity	p. 192
Quantitative and qualitative	p. 196
Conclusions	p. 197
Specialising: academic and business corpora	p. 198
Introduction	p. 198
Written academic English	p. 198
Written academic English: examples of frequency	p. 200
Spoken academic corpora	p. 203
Spoken academic English, conversation and spoken business English	p. 204
The CANBEC business corpus	p. 206
Chunks	p. 210
Problem and its institutional construction in CANBEC	p. 214
Summary	p. 216
Pedagogical implications	p. 216
Exploring teacher corpora	p. 220
Introduction	p. 220
Classroom discourse	p. 222
Frameworks for the analysis of classroom language	p. 222
Applying the frameworks to a corpus of classroom data	p. 229
Looking at questioning in the classroom	p. 233
Teacher corpora in professional development	p. 240
Conclusions and considerations	p. 243
Coda	p. 246
References	p. 249
Appendix 1	p. 284
Appendix 2	p. 297
Appendix 3	p. 301
Author index	p. 305
Subject index	p. 310
Publisher's acknowledgements	p. 314
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