What have corpora got to with language teachers? A brief note on my experience!

Not until I came to Atlanta and started my program here did I know how a teacher can use corpus in the class. I never felt interested in it as the discussion of the ownership of English was reasoned. Then I got to know how to use the concordance lextutor for our graduate writing class. In the following week, Dr. Friginal talked about it in our Technology and Language Teaching class. He mentioned his study in which he investigated the impact of the use of corpora and corpus-based instruction on the development of report writing skills of college-level students enrolled in a professional forestry program. He concluded that corpus instruction contributed to students' learning the patterns of the frequencies, and distributional data of linking words, reporting verbs and verb tenses in the students' reports in a positive way. As an assignment of the course, I prepared a 45-minute-lesson with an aim of teaching adverbial hedgers such as likely, perhaps, and probably. The assignment gave me an opportunity to design my writing class for the College of Business students and to realize that the corpus based activities were not too complicated at all. Indeed, by using corpora, a language teacher can create activities that students can raise their awareness in terms of the frequency of patterns and words, and variation across registers. In her article "Corpora and teaching academic writing: Exploring the pedagogical potential of MICUSP", Römer (in press) mentions direct and indirect pedagogical applications of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). She stated that students learning Academic English can directly browse papers related to their fields and carry out simple word or phrase searches.  When students are engaged in finding certain patterns and a frequency of a certain word, they can figure out the use of certain structures like this and might notice common phraseological items and their textual positions in the sample papers in the corpus. Based on my personal experiences and knowledge I got out of readings, I believe corpus-based activities created for language teaching (mainly reading and writing) are valuable for students who are in need of seeing the certain patterns and words in context as well as the collocations of the words.

For the tutorial, visit the website: http://micusp.elicorpora.info/micusp-simple-tutorials

Reference:
Römer, U. (in press). Corpora and teaching academic writing: Exploring the pedagogical potential of MICUSP.
To be published in Thomas, J and A. Boulton (eds.). Input, Process and Product: Development in Teaching and Language Corpora. Bruo: MUP.