Empowering Non-Native Speakers: The Hidden Surplus Value of Corpora in Continental English Departments
Christian Mair · 2002
This paper takes as its theoretical framework an approach to corpus-aided discovery learning in which the central role of corpora is seen as that of providing rich sources of autonomous learning activities of a serendipitous kind. Here the suggestion is put forward that availability of different corpora and software tools and the ability to combine these in different ways depending on the purpose of the activity may help learners develop an understanding of the patterned quality of activity may help learners develop an understanding of the patterned quality of language (probability, strength of co-occurrence restrictions, levels of contextual appropriateness), and be conducive to more appropriate use, as learners are guided not just to observe patterns, but also to develop hypotheses as to their variability. A learning experience is described, in which learners are introduced to a number of corpus tools (larger and smaller, general and specific, monolingual and bilingual corpora; two different software programmes for corpus analysis), and guided to progress from more convergent activities to autonomous browsing. Positive and negative sides of the approach are discussed, also in the light of learners' comments, and suggestions for improving the methodology and the tools currently available to learners are put forward.