POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES

THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

23
Corpora and Materials:
Towards a Working Relationship

MORALES, JV Andrew L.
ORGA, Ma. Ericca D.
BSEd-EN2D
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Introduction & Overview

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

What is a corpus and how does it differ from a DICTIONARY?

 A corpus is a collection of texts, writings, conversations, speeches etc.,

that people use to study and describe a language. We can call it a corpus
if (plural: corpora) when we use it for language research.
 Corpora can be used to study language in all its forms and uses. In
language teaching and learning, one of its most common functions has
been to inform dictionaries, grammar books, usage manuals,
textbooks, syllabuses, tests, and other resources.
 Corpora can help us find out how words are used in language. Most
of these keep corpora in the hands of expert corpus linguists, but there is
little reason why end-users cannot also make use of such tools and
techniques.

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpus Research and Materials: An Overview

 According to the book, while in reality both are used to refer to the same
thing, there is potentially an enormous difference between consultation
and learning; while one might assume that the act of looking up a word
in a dictionary (consultation) might lead to long-term retention, there is
no guarantee that this will be the case, even if it is the objective.

 Both the present authors have used corpora extensively for both
purposes (e.g. Boulton 2016; Boulton & Tyne 2014; Landure et Boulton
2010), and propose some short examples here of some of the activities
genuinely used with their students.

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpus Research & Materials : An Overview

 The present focus is primarily on using corpora as a reference
resource, in line with some of Romer (2006 p.124) refers obvious and
recognized strengths of corpus use in pedagogical context which means
it’s original uses, often referred to as ‘tip’, where the process was written
up and made available to outside learners.

 In our set of two pedagogical notes, the focus is on French learners of

English using similar techniques accessing the same corpus.

 Corpora can be found for many other languages on the web, as well as
for specific varieties of languages (e.g. law, medicine, etc.)
MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.
Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpus Insights and

Language Teaching Materials

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Lexis and Language Teaching Materials

 In terms of lexis, Koprowski (2005) noted that corpus research has made some
impact on coursebooks in that many now focus more on multi-word items than
was previously the case. However, he questions whether this focus is systematic
and optimally useful for learners.

 While designers have been enthusiastic about adding chunks to the syllabus, the
process of selecting items have been highly subjective and conducted without
reference to the corpus data.

 The result of this subjective and introspective approach to the selection of multi-
word items, he argues is that ‘nearly a quarter of the multi-word lexical items
may be specified of limited pedagogic value to learners.

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Lexis and Language Teaching Materials

• (Koprowski, 2005) appears to acknowledge a role for intuition and experience in
the selection of multi-word items, he points two specific weaknesses in the three
coursebooks he studied in depth:
1. There is too much focus on multi-word items of one type. He points out that in the
three coursebooks he surveyed the emphasis was far more heavily on simple
collocations rather than, for example, on phrasal verbs, binomials or longer fixed
expressions.
2. Multi-word items seem to be fitted around structural items in the syllabus. He
notes, for example, that in one of the coursebooks he surveyed phrasal verbs were
grouped according to the particle, for example ‘out’ or ‘up’

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Lexis and Language Teaching Materials

 Corpus findings seem also to have had a very limited influence on vocabulary
section. McCarten and McCarthy (2010) point to the following examples of
coursebooks in which vocabulary selection has been influenced by corpus
insights.

• The COBUILD English Course (Willis and Willis , 1989)

• face2face (Redston and Cunningham , 2005)

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Lexis and Language Teaching Materials

Unlike traditional syllabuses, this lexical syllabus starts from a
description of real language. COBUILD research has established
that the 700 most frequent words of English account for 70% of all
English text. The most frequent 1500 words make up 76% of text
and a total of 2500 words constitute 80% of all spoken and written
English. In taking these 2500 words, and their meanings as core
items, this syllabus offers genuine coverage of the most central and
typical patterns of English. The task-based methodology provides a
motivating context in which the learner is encouraged to
communicate in English. Early oral and written tasks are very
simple, so learners can readily achieve task objectives in English.

- Goodreads Book Review Summary

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Lexis and Language Teaching Materials

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Grammar and Language Teaching Materials

 A number of commentators have referred to the differences between grammatical

descriptions (or prescriptions) presented in coursebooks and grammatical
descriptions based on corpus evidence. Mindt (1996, p. 232, cited in McEnery
and Xiao, 2011), for example, speaks of ‘a kind of school English which does not
seem to exist outside the foreign language classroom’.
 Similarly, Römer (2006, pp. 125–6) speaks of ‘considerable mismatches between
naturally-occurring English and the English that is put forward as a model in
pedagogical descriptions.
 More specifically, Römer (2005), in a survey of ELT textbooks found that
progressive verb forms were presented more prominently than their corpus-
attested frequency would appear to warrant.
MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.
Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora and the Integration of Lexis and Grammar

 The convention in treating grammar and lexis as separate domains but however,
there is a consistent theme of corpus research that says that grammar and lexis are
far more closely linked than previously supposed.

 Furthermore, certain grammar rules are practically impossible to learn. Dave

Willis cites the grammar of orientation (which includes the notoriously difficult
present perfect and the uses of certain modal verbs) as particularly resistant to
teaching. The only way to grasp their meaning is through continuous exposure and
use.

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora and the Integration of Lexis and Grammar

 As an example of this relationship between grammar and lexis, Biber and Conrad
(2010, p. 4) consider the case of verbs followed by the ‘to-infinitive’, arguing that
‘most common verb + infinitive pairs can be grouped into general meaning
categories’:

• l want/need verbs: hope, like, need, want, want NP, wish

• l effort verbs: attempt, fail, manage, try
• l begin/continue verbs: begin, continue, start
• l ‘seem’ verbs: appear, seem, tend

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora and the Integration of Lexis and Grammar

 Tan (2003, p. 2) complains of ‘the persistence of coursebook designers and even
teachers in viewing grammar and vocabulary as separate areas of language
teaching’.

 Selivan (2011) says that unfortunately, many coursebooks still carefully grade the
texts to avoid any encounters with the structures that have not been formally
taught.

 The grammar practice should always start with the exploitation of lexical items.
Exposing students to a lot of natural and contextualized examples will offer a
lexical way into the grammar of the language.
MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.
Ericca
 POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Discourse and Language Teaching Materials

 Two criticisms have been made of coursebooks in terms of discourse: they fail to
account for the way words and structures are used in discourse and they
misrepresent the nature of real-life discourse.

 As an example of how coursebooks can fail to capture

the way words are used in discourse, Conrad (2004, p. 73) cites the treatment of
though in coursebooks:

Only one of the four [ESL textbooks] covers the use of though as linking adverbial
at all, and that book lists it only as showing contrast, not concession. None of these
books have an example of ‘though’ to soften disagreement.
MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.
Ericca
 POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Discourse and Language Teaching Materials

 Timmis (2012) also suggests that though is used far more often in conversation interactively
between speakers than it is to link two clauses by a single speaker. The example below from
the British National Corpus illustrates this interactive use:

S1: It’s not nice

S2: It’s funny though.

 Scotton and Bernsten (1988, p. 373) made a detailed comparison of real-life direction-giving
and direction-giving dialogues in coursebooks and found that:

Most textbook direction-giving dialogues contain only three parts: a request for directions, a set
of directions as the response, and a statement of thanks from the direction-seeker. Real direction-
giving contains more parts and certain distinctive discourse features, at least if the directions are
more than a few words.
MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.
Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Discourse and Language Teaching Materials

 Due to different settings, there are some dialogues that are not suitable and/or
inadequate for the real-life cognitive and interactional demands of a specific course of
action. Also culture is affected and one of the main factors of not understanding some
discourse.

 Situations conjured up for classroom teaching obviously do not take place in

communicative contexts; then how can they be authentic, if we choose to keep this
distinction? When students learn and practice a shopping “discourse”, they are by no
means doing shopping! Furthermore, as argued by Fox (1987), invented examples
often do not reflect nuances of usage. That is perhaps why, as Mindt (1996, p. 232)
observes, students who have been taught “school English” cannot readily cope with
English used by native speakers in real life.
MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.
Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Discourse and Language Teaching Materials

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora, Discourse and Language Teaching Materials

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora and Language Teaching

Methodology

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora and Language Teaching Methodology

 The Relevance of Corpus Findings for the content of language teaching materials.
 McCarten and McCarthy (2010) argue that precisely because a different picture of
language may discomfort teachers, the methodology should remain familiar, others
have argued that a different picture of language requires a change in methodological
mindset.
 Awareness-raising approach is preferred than production-oriented approach.
 Such an awareness approach was advocated by McCarthy and Carter (1995) who
proposed an I-I-I framework (Illustration-Induction-Interaction). This framework
was further developed by Timmis (2005) who proposed, for example, the use of
tasks where learners compare their expectations of language use with the reality of
language use. The emphasis of both these frameworks was strongly in favour of
awareness-raising with little or no emphasis on production.
MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.
Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpora and Language Teaching Methodology

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Reservations about corpora and language teaching

materials

 The challenge for a teacher who wishes to encourage students.

 Corpora can be used in language teaching in two ways (Leech, 1997,

p. 10): The soft version, requires only the teacher to have access to,
and the skills to use, a corpus and the relevant software.

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
 POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Reservations about corpora and language teaching

materials

 For reservations, teachers taking into consideration the aims of a lesson,

the design or selection of materials and the management of learning, in
relation to teachers and learners, we can define combinations that cover
the spectrum from totally teacher- center to totally learner- center.

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Corpus research and materials: Into the Future

 The teacher prints out examples from the corpus and devises the tasks.

 Learners work with these corpus-derived and corpus-based materials [Bernardini,

2004; Granger & Tribble]

 At the teacher- centered end, the teacher decides on the aims of the lesson,
selects/designs the materials and manages the lesson.

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Towards a corpus-referred approach

 The corpus-based approach makes the task of translation evaluation
somewhat less difficult by removing a great deal of the subjectivity,
and by providing the translator trainer.
 With improved access to the appropriate conceptual and linguistic
information of a specialized subject field as documented by experts in
that field.
 In short, a specially designed Evaluating Corpus can act as a
benchmark against which translator trainers can compare student
translations on a number of different levels.
MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.
Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Towards a corpus-referred approach

 It can also referred by having access to a wide range of

authentic and suitable texts, the trainer can verify or correct the
students’ choices both conceptual and linguistic, and can
provide more constructive feedback based on the evidence (or
indeed, on the lack of evidence) in the corpus.

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Conclusion
 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, as pointed out by Pym (1992:
283), the analysis of translation errors inevitably leads to an analysis
of translation teaching.

 The techniques used for extracting useful information from corpora

will differ from language to language and from subject field to subject
field.

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

Conclusion
 Bringing corpora into the translation classroom helps not only
students but also teachers to raise interest in and awareness of
specialized language helping them to become more independent
learners.

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca
POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES
THE COUNTRY’S 1ST POLYTECHNICU

References:
 Tomlinson, B. (2002). Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching.
 Christiansen, M.H. (2015) Division of Labor in Vocabulary Structure: Insights From Corpus
Analyses. Retrieved from: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12164
 McEnery, T. and Xiao, R. (2012) What Corpora Can Offer in Language Teaching and Learning.
Retrieved from:
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/corpus/ZJU/xpapers/McEnery_Xiao_teaching.PDF
 Selivan, L. (2012) Grammar VS Lexis or Grammar through Lexis? Retrieved from:
https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/grammar-vs-lexis-or-grammar-through-lexis
 Römer, U. (2008) Corpora and Language Teaching. Retrieved from:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.researchgate.net/publication/292231284_Corpora_and_langua
ge_teaching/amp

MORALES, JV Andrew and ORGA, Ma.

Ericca