6 Benefits of using corpora
In the final video extract, Maggie gives her views on the benefits of using corpora. She uses the term collocation, which refers to the tendency of words to occur with particular other words more than would be expected by chance. For example, make collocates with a + mistake and raining collocates with heavily.)
Activity 4 Maggie Charles’s views on the benefits of corpora
Allow about 15 minutes
List the three benefits of using corpora that Maggie mentions.
Discussion
- Maggie says that it’s important for students to have ‘repeated exposure to a lot of examples’ as a key feature of corpora. In a text, students might only see one example; whereas, in a corpus they would see lots of examples of a phrase or collocation.
- Using a corpus focuses attention on the context of a word. It’s possible to see words in the context of concordance lines, whole paragraphs or even the whole text.
- Maggie points out that concordance lines highlight how language is a ‘patterned phenomenon’. The corpus user can look at all the words appearing to the left or right of a particular search word and see what words commonly come before or after the search word.
OpenLearn - Language in professional life
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