Baik, Mi-soon
Internet-Based Language Teaching
Week 7 Summary
1. Reinhardt (2010)
As technology develops more and more, corpus linguistics has been enlarging its realm and its findings are revealing much of the real language use. Especially, in real language use, the importance of its context is being spotlighted because it has much effect on how language is expressed in a different form from the grammar that we have known. This corpus-based method began to play its role in the field of language pedagogy and researches. Even though there are some criticisms on corpus-based approach from Chomskyan standpoints and Cook (1998)’s implication of its favoritism on nativeness which could lead to disempowered attitude for language learners.
Corpus-based pedagogy such as Tim Jones (1991)’s data-driven learning (DDL) or Willis’s Lexical Approach (1991) has gaining some pros and cons in the field of second language pedagogy. In my opinion, it can provide great opportunity for second language learners in terms of authentic input or learning useful collocations in the target language, but it should be adapted with great care and enough considerations on appropriate timing for introducing it to learners.
2. Perez-Paredes (2011)
This article is very solid in terms of collecting tangible data. It analyses learners’ actual use of corpus-based resources in various ways analyzing the number of: actions of each individual who is working on the given task with computer, different web site used, completed activities, searches performed on the British National Corpus (BNC), and words or wildcards per BNC search. Setting experiment group with guided corpus consultation and control group with non-guided, the researchers tried to show the difference of two groups’ EFL learning behaviors directly using computer tracking software called “Fiddler”.
The result of this research generally shows more use of the corpus and more pursuit of information related to the language task in experiment group with statistically significant difference compared to the control group. This implies that the guided-consultation of using corpus is beneficial to learners to be more autonomous and gain information by the corpus-based language usage. Also, this direct method of tracking down learners’ behavior on computer will provide the authentic information of learner behavior for various research areas.
3. A comparison and contrast of both articles
These two articles are dealing with DDL through corpus-based approach. Reinhardt (2010) introduced some linguistic arguments in relation to corpus linguistics and its pedagogical perspectives and Perez-Paredes (2011) focused more on the direct research methods which can provide firm evidence which is supporting for corpus-based language instruction in a positive way. I learned the possible benefits and side effects of corpus-informed language teaching from the literature review provided in the first article and the importance of collecting factual data and explicit construct of experiment from the latter. Both are very helpful to me.
4. Clarification question and application question
- The debate between Chomskyan view and constructivists’ view toward language acquisition seems very interesting to me. I want to read and learn more about it.
- I agree with the value of corpus-based pedagogy in more advanced level of EFL learning. But I think its application in the beginner’s level is quite hard. How can I implement corpus-based methods in my own classroom?
Reference
Perez-Paredes, P., Sanchez-Tornel, M., Calero, J. M., & Jimenes, P. A. (2011). Tracking learners’ actual uses of corpora: guided vs. non-guided corpus consultation. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 24:3, 223-253.
Reinhardt, J. (2010). The potential of corpus-informed L2 pedagogy. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 1(3), 239-251.
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