corporainlanguageeducation

corporainlanguageeducation内容摘要：

ey have been explored to inform curriculum design, materials development and teaching methodology (cf. Keck 2020) • For direct use, they provide a bottomup approach to language teaching and learning as opposed to the topdown approach with native corpora of the target language (Osborne 2020) Learner corpora • Can also provide indirect, observable, and empirical evidence for the invisible mental process of language acquisition and serve as a test bed for hypotheses generated using the psycholinguistic approach in SLA research • Provide an empirical basis enabling the findings previously made on the basis of limited data of a handful of informants to be generalized • Have widened the scope of SLA research so that interlanguage research nowadays treats learner performance data in its own right rather than as decontextualised errors in traditional error analysis (cf. Granger 1998: 6) Ongoing debate: Frequency amp。 authenticity • Often considered as two of the most important advantages of using corpora • Also the targets of criticism from language pedagogy researchers – Corpus data impoverishes language learning by giving undue prominence to what is simply frequent at the expense of rarer but more effective or salient expressions (Cook 1998) – Corpus data is authentic only in a very limited sense in that it is decontextualized – genuine but not authentic (Widdowson 1990, 2020, 2020) – …flawed arguments Frequency • ‘Using corpus data not only increases the chances of learners being confronted with relatively infrequent instances of language use, but also of their being able to see in what way such uses are atypical, in what contexts they do appear, and how they fit in with the pattern of more prototypical uses’ (Osborne 2020: 486) • ‘Frequency ranking will be a parameter for sequencing and grading learning materials’ because ‘frequency is a measure of probability of usefulness’ and ‘highfrequency words constitute a core vocabulary that is useful above the incidental choice of text of one teacher or textbook author’ (Goethals 2020: 424) Frequency • Do you agree? – ‘What is frequent in language will be picked up by learners automatically, precisely because it is frequent, and therefore does not have to be consciously learned’ (Kaltenb246。 ck and MehlmauerLarcher 2020: 78) • This is not true, however – crosslinguistic difference – Determiners such as a and the are certainly very frequent in English, yet they are difficult for Chinese learners of English because their mother tongue does not have such grammatical morphemes and does not maintain a countmass noun distinction Frequency • Frequency ‘should be only one of the criteria used to influence instruction’。 ‘the facts about language and language use which emerge from corpus analyses should never be allowed to bee a burden for pedagogy’ (Kennedy 1998: 290) – overall teaching objectives – learners’ concrete situations – cognitive salience – learnability – generative value – teachers’ intuitions Frequency • It would be inappropriate for language teachers, syllabus designers, and materials writers to ignore ‘pelling frequency evidence already available’ (Leech 1997: 16) – ‘Whatever the imperfections of the simple equation “most frequent” = “most important to learn”, it is difficult to deny that frequency information being available from corpora has an important empirical input to language learning materials.’ – Lech, G. (2020) ‘Why frequency can no longer bw ignored in ELT’. 外语教学与研究 2020(1). • Frequency can at least help syllabus designers, materials writers and teachers alike to make betterinformed and more carefully motivated decisions (cf. Gavioli and Aston 2020: 239) Authenticity • Corpus data are authentic by definition • Widdowson (1990, 2020) questions the use of authentic texts in language teaching – Authenticity of language in the classroom is ‘an illusion’ (1990: 44) because even though corpus data may be authentic in one sense, its authenticity of purpose is destroyed by its use with an unintended audience of language learners Authenticity • Widdowson’s (2020) distinction between genuineness (features of text as a product) vs. authenticity (features of discourse as a process) – Corpora are genuine in that they prise attested language use, but they are not authentic for language teaching because their contexts (as opposed to cotexts) have been deprived – Implication? • Only language produced for imaginary situations in the classroom is ‘authentic’ Authenticity • Product (text) vs. process (discourse) – Interesting but not always useful – Using product as evidence for process may not be less reliable。 sometimes this is the only practical way of finding about process (cf. Stubbs 2020) • Stubbs (2020) draws a parallel between corpora in corpus linguistics and rocks in geology – ‘both assume a relation between process and product. By and large, the processes are invisible, and must be inferred from the products.’ Authenticity • Like geologists who study rocks (products) because they are interested in geological processes (. earthquakes, volcanoes) to which they do not have direct access, SLA researchers can analyze learner performance data (products) to infer the inaccessible mental process of SLA Authenticity • If we do follow Widdowson’s distinction… – Genuine: attested – Authentic: occurring in real municative context • …are the imaginary situations conjured up for classroom teaching authentic? – Do they occur in real municative context? – When students are learning and practising a shopping ‘discourse’, are they actually doing shopping? Authenticity • Furthermore, invented examples often do not reflect nuances and plexities of real usage (Fox 1987) – S。