Reflection: Using Corpora for Instruction

Over the past week, our topic of discussion has been using corpora for second language instruction.  The Reppen chapter provided a general overview of corpus linguistics and corpus applications for teaching while the Flowerdew article addressed common critiques of corpus uses for language teaching.

One thing that really stuck out in my mind, especially when reading the Flowerdew article, was that all of the activities and courses being described in examples of corpus use in the classroom involved extremely high-level students.  Legal writing courses, business letters for prospective MBA students, biochemistry report writing- all of which are types of courses that typically won't be offered in a conventional IEP.  Flowerdew does address this, citing a nice Gardner quote about how just to be able to fully benefit from examining concordance lines, students will need to know every word on either side of the key word in context.  However, I feel that in teacher training, this disclaimer for using corpus-based instruction should be made a bit more forward.  Having beginner and intermediate students (and maybe even low-advanced students) interact with corpora would seem to largely be folly.

That being said, I do feel that the Flowerdew article did make compelling cases for the use of corpora in some of those very advanced, highly-specialized contexts.  I liked the idea of taking a more top down approach and then examining useful words, phrases, or features in specific parts of the discourse (e.g., methods section, invitation in a business letter, etc.).  Still, I have reservations about the time needed for learners to learn how to use the corpus tool and then to investigate and analyze.  As a native speaker graduate student who has had to investigate corpora as part of my coursework, I am confident in saying that it's not always quick, easy, or intuitive.

Flowerdew mentioned that certain resources may be more appropriate than others, noting that corpora may not be the most efficient or effect means for students to acquire specific types of knowledge about English.  Some well-crafted dictionaries can more quickly and directly highlight how words with similar meanings are used differently (Flowerdew used tall and high) as examples.  Additionally, learner errors might not show up in authentic corpora, so the use of reference grammars that highlight common learner errors may be more useful for some forms.  This brings me to the idea of corpus-driven instruction, that is, instructional materials or activities that are driven by corpus data (I suppose this is also referred to as Data Driven Learning (DDL)) rather than having students interface directly with corpus software.  I think this, largely, is the way to go with anything but those high-level, highly specialized courses described earlier, and in some cases may even be more efficient in those courses as well.