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
Transcript
MAGGIE CHARLES
What I want the students to get out of it is ways in which they can, for example, use ‘I’ and ‘we’ that will be functional and acceptable within their own discipline. I think the other really big issue is an issue of the student’s identity and self-confidence. And one of the things that, of course, the programme does is it socialises the student into a disciplinary research-community, so that they start to think in the way that the disciplinary community thinks. And they need, also at that stage, to be able to take on the writing conventions of that disciplinary community in order to be accepted by it.
[Talking in class] What I want us to do, then, is to move on. And we’re going to do two things. First of all, I’m going to show you a tool which is going to help you pick out short phrases from corpora. And we’re going to have a look at that in relation to the social science corpus and see what sort of functions come out of that. And then you’re going to move on and have a look at – using this tool – have a look at what happens in your own corpus.
One of the most important things is that the students get repeated exposure to a lot of examples. So, for example, if you present a new word or a new grammatical pattern or a new collocation in a text, the students will probably only see it once. But if they can see that in a corpus, then they are able to see lots of examples of the same sort of ... whether it’s a phrase or a collocation or a word. OK, so that’s the repeated exposure which I think helps learning.
Another of the really important things is that it focuses students’ attention on the context of the word. So, instead of just looking at a verb out of context, you’ve got the verb as it appears in a wider context. What the students can do, of course, is to expand that context so that they can see not just the word, not even just the concordance line, but actually go right back into the original text and see the whole paragraph, or as much of the text as they want.
A third thing is that when you’re looking at concordance lines, they highlight, very clearly indeed, the way that language is a patterned phenomenon.
MAGGIE CHARLES
[Talking in class] More frequently than the experts?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
MAGGIE CHARLES
Interestingly, it seems to be an individual trait of this particular writer.
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.