Corpus linguistics, applied linguistics & technology in language education
Those who during the last decade tried to barricade the profession against the influence of corpora recycled the critical arguments of the theoreticians thirty years before, and we heard again that no corpus can be a totally accurate sample of a language, that occurrence in a corpus is no guarantee of correctness, that frequency is … Read more
How can usage-based SLA invigorate language education? Prof. Lourdes Ortega, Georgetown University F. Education, University of Cambridge, 17:00-18:30 SLEG Cambridge talks: URL Some ideas discussed in the talk A multilingual under a multilingual perspective: not necessarily from birth mot mativelike not even equally proficient in different L2s It is in usage that we find explanations … Read more
Representativeness Balance, representativeness and comparability are ideals which corpus builders strive for but rarely, if ever, attain. In truth, the measures of balance and representativeness are matters of degree. V´aradi (2001) has been critical of the failure of corpus linguists to fully define and realise a balanced and representative corpus. Even proposals, such as those … Read more
Tyler & Ortega (2018: 317): Quite simply, corpora are the place to look for patterns of usage. Moreover, we believe that in usage-inspired instruction L2 targets should be taught not just because they can be taught – that is, because we have a good linguistic description or can create good materials – but because corpus … Read more
First steps Some useful tutorials Concordances: simple searches Concordances: advanced search CQL 1: basic syntax CQL 2: document structures CQ3: search within structures Build your own corpus