Corpora in the Foreign Language Classroom: Selected papers from the Sixth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC 6). University of Granada, Spain, 4-7 July, 2004(61 Language and Computers)

The papers published in this volume were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora (4-7 July 2004 Granada, Spain) and reflect the latest developments that have taken place in the field of the teaching applications of text corpora, with a special emphasis on their use in the foreign language classroom. The book is divided into three main sections. The first section sets the scene for what this collection of essays aims to be. It deals with the issue of what corpus linguistics can do not only for the understanding of the nature of language itself but also for so fundamental and miraculous a matter such as language learning and language acquisition. The second section tackles the issues of corpus design and corpus exploitation and provides the reader with a great variety of evidence in favour of corpora exploitation for the building of a successful teaching environment. The final section deals with practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom. Although each of the papers here reports particular experiences in very different teaching and learning contexts, as a whole they show that corpora can be used on the spot in a language teaching context by teachers and learners without extensive training in computational tools, and studies of linguistics features can be tailored to specific pedagogic context and learning requirements. The book represents a solid contribution to linguistic studies and language teaching and it is a good example of the diversity of the scientific lines in which corpus linguistics is involved at the present moment.

Table of Contents:
Foreword Encarnación HIDALGO TENORIO, Luis QUEREDA and Juan SANTANA: I Setting the scene Angela CHAMBERS: Popularising corpus consultation by language learners and teachers Stig JOHANSSON: Using corpora: from learning to research II Theoretical issues: corpus design and exploitation in the foreign language classroom Sabine BRAUN: Designing and exploiting small multimedia corpora for autonomous learning and teaching Kiyomi CHUJO, Masao UTIYAMA and Chikako NISHIGAKI: Towards building a usable corpus collection for the ELT classroom Peter Y.W. LAM: A corpus-driven lexico-grammatical analysis of English tourism industry texts and the study of its pedagogic implications in English for Specific Purposes Xiaotian GUO: Errors or partial acquisition: a case study of a young English learner’s interlanguage Josta VAN RIJ-HEYLIGERS: To weep perilously or W.EAP critically: the case for a corpus-based critical EAP Fanny MEUNIER and Céline GOUVERNEUR: The treatment of phraseology in ELT textbooks Carmen PÉREZ BASANTA and María Elena RODRÍGUEZ MARTÍN: The application of data-driven learning to a small-scale corpus: using film transcripts for teaching conversational skills III Practical applications of corpora in the foreign language classroom Stephen COFFEY: Investigating restricted semantic sets in a large general corpus: learning activities for students of English as a foreign language Sara GESUATO: How (dis)similar? Telling the difference between near-synonyms in a foreign language David MINUGH: George Bush and the Last Crusade or the fight for truth, justice and the American way Szilvia PAPP: Inductive learning and self-correction with the use of learner and reference corpora Nele OLIVIER, Lieselotte BREMS, Kristin DAVIDSE, Dirk SPEELMAN and Hubert CUYCKENS: Pattern-learning and pattern-description: an integrated approach to proficiency and research for students of English Julia LAVID: Contrastive patterns of mental transitivity in English and Spanish: a student-centered corpus-based study Agnieszka LEŃKO-SZYMAŃSKA: Past progressive or simple past? The acquisition of progressive aspect by Polish advanced learners of English Andy CRESSWELL: Getting to ‘know’ connectors? Evaluating data-driven learning in a writing skills course Christopher TRIBBLE: Managing relationships in professional writing Alejandro Curado FUENTES: A corpus-based assessment of reading comprehension in English for Tourism studies Afterword Bill LOUW: Truth, literary worlds and devices as collocation

About the Author :
Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio is senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Granada, Spain, where she teaches a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on English language and linguistics. Her doctoral thesis was concerned with Irish theatre (the Abbey Theatre phenomenon) seen under the lenses of mainly discourse analysis. Her current main areas of research include gender studies, critical linguistics and corpus linguistics. Luis Quereda is a Professor in the English Department at the University of Granada, Spain, where he teaches English language and linguistics. His current main areas of research include English descriptive linguistics, contrastive linguistics and corpus linguistics. He is the author of A morphosyntactic study of the English verb phrase and co-editor of Homenaje a J.R. Firth en su centenario. Juan Santana is a senior lecture in the English Department at the University of Granada, Spain, where he teaches English language and linguistics. His current main areas of research include English descriptive linguistics and corpus linguistics. He is the author of La categoría gramatical de pronombre en inglés and co-editor of Homenaje a J.R. Firth en su centenario.

Review :
"this is a volume that all those interested in language learning and corpora should be able to consult." - in: ReCALL, Vol. 19/3 (2007)