Corpora and language awareness

again i am raising the question of efficiency of using corpus data in learning and teaching. corpus data help a lot in retrieving patterns, collocations for example. but it does not make teachable and learnable materials themselves.
 
Sounds like widdowson. In what ways are corpus data not teachable or learnable? Mindt and many others seem to come to just opposite conclusions.
 
My humble opinions:
Corpus data can certainly be used in teaching and learning but not very effiecient. for example, to find the collocational pattern of each phrasal verb, teachers and learners have to be go to the corpus and rely too much on the concordances. alternatively, grammar books can be complied as the series out of the cobuild. in that case, we just have another updated grammar books.

so corpus-based approach doesn't fundamentally change our way of learning and teaching.
 
Cobuild grammar pattern series are based on corpora. Producing corpus-based reference books such as grammars and learner dictionaries is a kind of what Leech (1997) calls indrect use of corpora in language teaching.

Now you mentioned collocations. I must say that the only reliale way to extract statistically significant collocations is use corpora (see my posting on "Collocation, semantic prosody and near synonymy" for further arguments). In the language classroom, KWIC concodrances sorted in a proper order also provide a visual aid in learning collocations.

With that said, we have to admit that corpora are not alll powerful. What cannot be done using a corpus-based approach must be done using other methods. But no doubt corpora have certainly changed what is taught and how it is taught in many parts of the world.

For further discussion of the pros and cons of using corpora in language teaching, I would recommend Seidlhofer's (2003) book "Controversies in Applied Linguistics" (section 2), published by the Oxford University Press.
 
Very interesting discussion concerning efficiency of using corpus-based appoach in language learning. Recently my college and I just finished an experiment on using corpus for C-E translation reference in the classroom. It really disappointed us that the students responded with refusing to use corpora in the future when they were interviewed after the experiment.
 
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