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? Mari Carmen Campoy, Begona Bellés-Fortuno and Ma Llu?sa Gea-Valor 2010
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ISBN: 978-1-8470-6537-7 (Paperback)
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
From its origins, Corpus Linguistics has had a strong link with language
teaching. John Sinclair’s impact on dictionary making and his pioneering
work on corpus research (Sinclair 1987, 1991, 2004) have been the starting
point for many corpus-based approaches to language teaching (Wichmann
et al. 1997; Burnard and McEnery 2000; Granger et al. 2002; Kettemann
and Marko 2002; Aston et al. 2004; O’Keefe et al. 2007; Aijmer 2009, to
name but a few). The common ground for all these approaches is that they
are based on empirical evidence, thus leading to the elaboration of better
quality learner input and providing teachers and researchers with a wider,
fi ner perspective into language in use, that is, into the understanding of
how language works in specifi c contexts.
Corpus-Based Approaches to ELT presents work by leading linguists exploring
different ways of applying corpus-based and corpus-informed research
to language teaching environments. More specifi cally, the volume tackles
three main areas of special interest today: the use of corpora for teaching
English for Specifi c Purposes, pedagogically motivated uses of
corpora, and the potential of corpora-mediated multimodal tools for the
language learning context.
The compilation, description and analysis of domain-specifi c corpora
is one of the widest areas of research in corpus linguistics, especially as
regards academic and professional settings. This book provides an in-depth
analysis of academic and professional texts by means of corpus-based
methodologies in order to enhance English for Specifi c Purposes (ESP)
teaching. A wide perspective into ESP corpora is offered, as the chapters
include written and spoken academic discourse, the use of English language
in professional contexts, and the use of both native English speaker corpora
and ESP learner corpora, that is, corpora in which learners attempt at
producing professional texts.
The second issue examined in this volume has to do with how English
language teaching may benefi t from corpus data to improve language
learner input (the so-called corpus-based and corpus-informed approaches)
and the different ways in which corpora may aid in understanding learner
and teacher discourse. In this sense, the volume illustrates the way corpora
may be used directly in the classroom and how corpus research may be
applied to inform syllabi and classroom materials.
Finally, the third dimension refl ects on the role of corpus tools and
multimodal devices, where corpora-based research plays a central role to
inform teaching materials. Multimodal corpora are still in their infancy
when compared to corpora where only one discourse mode is used.
Challenges in this area lie not only in the design of such corpora, a diffi cult
task per se, but also in the refl ection on how information is organized and
connected among the different text modes. Far from being just an inclusion
of one or more corpora within a learning package and allowing users access
to concordance and collocational information, this entails having a clear
idea of the pedagogical goals of both tool and tool applications and how
corpora are integrated in the tasks a learner is intended to carry out. It
also implies a lot of research into feasible text mode combinations and
consensus on issues such as possible tagging categories and terminology in
order to be able to contrast studies carried out by different researchers.
The volume opens with Ute R?mer’s chapter, in which she presents and
discusses the state of the art in the fi eld of corpus linguistics and language
teaching. The author provides an overview of the past, present and future
developments in corpus linguistics, reviewing the applications of general
and specialized corpora. R?mer insightfully points at the need to foster the
use of pedagogical corpora and draws a work agenda around three main
topics: focus on learner and teacher needs, indirect uses of corpora in
language teaching and direct uses of corpora in language teaching.
