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joyce L

Krieger - Corpus Linguistics: What It Is and How It Can Be Applied to Teaching(I-TESL-J) - 2 views

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    corpus
joyce L

Ramesh's Data-driven Approach article 1 - 1 views

  • A word may have many potential meanings, but its actual meaning in any authentic written or spoken text is determined by its context: its collocations, structural patterns, and pragmatic functions.
  • Some people talk more accurately about words having potential meanings. Their actual meaning in any authentic written or spoken text is determined by their context: their collocations, structural patterns, and pragmatic functions
  • learners will need contexts in order to learn the language. Where can we get these contexts from? We can make them up (as most lexicographers, linguists and teachers did in the past) but, because our memories and intuitions are often inaccurate and incomplete, we usually make up contexts that are inaccurate and incomplete.
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  • anguage corpora are collections of authentic written and spoken texts, created in genuine communicative situations, and provide us with many real contexts.
  • Corpora allow students to see many examples of the word, phrase, or grammatical structure at the same time. They also notice patterns of usage and work out rules for themselves, and therefore remember them better.
  • for English there are the British National Corpus, and the COBUILD Bank of English corpus. It is also fairly easy to collect smaller corpora oneself, from texts available on the World Wide W
  • Only two such facilities will be covered here: frequency and concordance
joyce L

R is for Rules « An A-Z of ELT - 0 views

  • A passive knowledge affects learners’ competence more than performance and befits accuracy more than fluency. So putting a big emphasis on rules is a back-to-front approach; placing form before meaning, knowledge before skills and study before learning.
  • This story suggests to me that conscious learning of rules is likely to be effective only under certain conditions, e.g. when the learner is motivated (as in Isherwood’s case by having a ‘gap’ in his competence pointed out to him) and, even more important perhaps, when the learner is ready — i.e. at the right stage in his/her interlanguage development. I
  • “When we use language in real communication, grammar manisfests itself in ways that seem to have little to do with the conscious application of these linguistic facts (=rules). Grammar seems to be more like a process” (p. 1).
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  • the central misunderstanding of language of language teaching to assume that grammar (rules and terminology) is the basis of language and that the mastery of the grammatical system is a prerequisite for effective communication” (Michael Lewis, 1997, p. 133).
  • I think using consciousness-raising activities with learners to prime their minds for noticing grammar works in the same vein. We want them to be conscious, with a great deal of logical precision, of the rule-based patterns we are showing them so that they can work it out for themselves (thus promoting autonomy!) However, when a CR task is finished, it only makes sense that we check to make sure that learners have gone through the process in the intended way, a sort of confirmation that yes, indeed, they have got the rule right – and this IS the rule. In the end, where do we draw the line? We either start with the rule or end with i
  • . In fact, I’m not even that bothered if their rules are ‘wrong’, so long as that they are ‘heuristic’ — that is that they provide a learning ‘hook’ – or the kind of self-scaffolding materials that I mentioned in my post. Dick Schmidt’s ‘rule-of-thumb’ for the imperfect in Portuguese probably worked better for him than the dozen or so grammar book rules his teacher was trying to teach him.
  • CRITICISM, YESTERDAY, “ne nado bylo”. That’s it. Nothing really new. The keywords are labels, can we call them rules? I think we can. Have I explained it? Yes, since they understood and used it appropriately.
  • I would say that your ‘shorthand’ rules do qualify as rules, in the sense of being rules-of-thumb, reminders, or mnemonics, rather than fully descriptive rules, and are all the more effective for being so
  • Diane Larsen-Freeman distinguishes between rules and reasons: “It is important for learners not only to know the rules, but also to know why they exist. I’m not referring to how the language came to be; I am referring to what I call the ‘reasons’ underlying the rules”. As an example she gives the rule that prohibits using the progressive with stative verbs (as in *I am owning a car). “The reason for the rule is due to the semantic incompatibility between processes depicted by the progressive, which typically involve change, and unchanging states embodied in stative verbs… Knowing the reason for a rule… gives language students an understanding of the logic that speakers of another language use” (pp. 50-51).
  • ules about language are seldom watertight, and are often fuzzy at the edges — not least because there is so much variability in language, due to factors such as geography, register and style, and mode (e.g. speaking versus writing)
  • A quick corpus search reveals many so-called exceptions (all from the British National Corpus):
  • “rules of production”, as opposed to rules of accuracy. E.g. if expressing future meaning, when in doubt, use ‘will’ (you have a statistcally very favorable chance of being right). Or, use ‘Really?’ or ‘…no?’ instead of short questions and question tags – they’ll save you a lot of bother!
  • is that it conflates both prescriptive rules (what you should say) and descriptive ones, (what people in fact do say) without making a distinction. As language teachers, the assumption is that we are more interested in the latter, but the distinction is not always that clear cut
  • So, if we’re going to use rules, maybe we should raise learners’ consciousness about language in general, including their own language, before we even start.
  • teaching using very simplified, one-word rules (I call them “keyword rules”) introduced through situations and contexts and immediately practiced in situations, with subsequent abundant exposure to the structures within broader contexts (reading, listening) – so the rule is there to provide a sense of security, yet it is so minimal that it does not in any way dominate the teaching/learning.
  • teaching the students to notice, process, verify and acquire language odds and ends independently
  • letting go of them and not teaching anything, but simply immersing them in the language
  • It’s not the rules as such that are to blame for the learner’s struggle – it’s the abstract and obscure meta-language used to formulate the rules, along with the lack of situation-based practice
  • Teaching rules as part of a process of acquisition has always seemed pointless to me, and as Mr Lewis points out in The English Verb, most of the rules we have to describe grammar (where grammar means the verb phrase) are inadequate and just plain wrong.
  • learners uncovering rules allows learners the chance to notice regularities and patterns in the language
  • They also allow learners to reflect on their own language. It helps them notice. They’ll take the language they said/wrote and compare it to the rules they know. Without a knowledge of rules, this self-reflection may not happen for some students. In effect, it encourages a second look and even a reformulation. There is also the point made above of students noticing the rules when seeing/hearing the language used.
  • As far as acquisition goes, rules have little direct impact. However, in their ability to instill comfort in many students and their aid in allowing students to notice language (their own and others) they can have a indirect impact on acquisition.
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