Learning with Corpora

TLDR: Learning with Corpora as discussed by the authors is a pedagogy of meaning-focused, learner-centered, communicative language teaching with a focus on the role of the learner.

Abstract: Guy Aston, ed Learning with Corpora Houston: Athelstan, 2001 276 pp $2495 paper The relationship between academic research and actual classroom teaching, between what Graeme Kennedy has called the "scientifically interesting" and the "pedagogically useful" (qtd in Aston 1), can be problematic In Learning with Corpora, Guy Aston and his contributors attempt to clarify the often confusing distinction between research and teaching More specifically, they are concerned with the questions of how to apply research to classroom situations effectively, how to shift from a corpus-based descriptive linguistics towards a corpus-based pedagogy for language teaching and learning Aston is aware that a move of this kind is still somewhat undefined, but, as he says, one should clearly "not expect descriptive and pedagogic approaches to corpora to share the same methods and concerns, since language learners are not trained linguists, and are generally not concerned to analyze the language for its own sake, but only insofar as this helps them to use it" (2) It is precisely those different "methods and concerns" that constitute both the principal subject matter of Learning with Corpora and the newer, more original pedagogy that it offers Concurrently, and as a corollary to those differing preoccupations, the book seeks to position such a pedagogy within the prevailing paradigm of meaning-focused, learner-centered, communicative language teaching Given that the major approaches to language teaching typically focus on the learner and the learning process, while ignoring, or at least deemphasizing, linguistic facts per se, efforts to develop more empirical approaches, what Tim Johns refers to as "data-driven learning" (qtd in Aston 19), have traditionally been resisted by many teachers and education theorists As Aston points out, however, an interest in form, an interest in what is being learned in the classroom, is not automatically antithetical to the task-based negotiation of meaning characteristic of communicative teaching methodologies (23) Indeed a central argument of Learning with Corpora, is that corpora arc learning and teaching resources capable of both "improv[ing] competence, increasing learner's knowledge of the language and culture" and "engag[ing] capacity, helping learners develop their ability to use the language as a means of communication, both in reception and production" (5) They can be employed to assist learners in the discovery and checking of linguistic facts and for the generation of situated textual meanings (4) Corpora can, in short, be utilized to teach learners about the language as well as provide them opportunities to use the language-a focus on form and description can quite easily and naturally lead to a focus on meaning and communication Furthermore, and also in line with current pedagogical theory, corpora-based teaching affords numerous opportunities for encouraging and strengthening learner autonomy, "providing learners with learning instruments which they can exploit independently, and developing their ability to do so" (5) In the final chapter of Learning with Corpora, Silvia Bernardini offers an example of what she calls a "pedagogy of discovery" (228), one based on her own personal exploration of the British National Corpus Starting with an analysis of the adjective spoiled/spoilt, Bernardini describes how she first concentrated on the "pampered" sense of the term and the ideological connotations it appears to convey (interestingly, spoiled/ spoilt are used almost exclusively to describe children and women, but never men) She then changed directions slightly, going on to analyze the textual behavior and lexico-syntactic variation of the phrase spoiltled for choice At that point, two parallel paths of investigation emerged; one involving other phrases in which "spoil" appeared (to the victor the spoils, too many cooks spoil the broth), and from there to spoil and spoils as nouns; the other leading into an intratextual analysis of a fairly lengthy section of text from a tourism brochure in which the word choice and its inflections were quite frequent …