7 The teacher’s perspective
Next, listen to an audio interview conducted with Maggie after the lesson that you have just seen. First of all, Maggie was asked how she felt the lesson had gone and whether it was a typical class.
Activity 5 Interview with Maggie Charles
Make brief notes on what you think might go wrong in carrying out corpus searches if you haven’t used one before. Then listen to Maggie’s response.
Transcript
PRESENTER
First, Maggie gives her view on how her lesson went.
MAGGIE CHARLES
I think it went reasonably well. It’s true that whenever you’re using any sort of technical aids, there can be technical problems, so we were quite lucky. None of the students forgot their passwords, they could all log on, they could all actually start to use the software. And I think most of the students in that class were actually not having any problems with their corpora.
So they’ve built the corpora ... This is their second week of building it. So the corpora aren’t very big, but, nonetheless, everybody managed to find plenty of instances of the search term.
Discussion
Maggie felt the class had gone ‘reasonably well’. There were no problems in this class, but she mentioned some potential issues. These included technical issues such as students forgetting their passwords and pedagogical issues such as students not finding many instances of the search term.
Next, Maggie was asked whether she ever found that students didn’t see the purpose in using corpora and corpus software. Again, think about the kind of thing students might say, then listen to Maggie’s response.
Transcript
MAGGIE CHARLES
When I first started using this software, I did find that … one student memorably said to me ‘Why are we doing this? It’s just a technique,’ and I explained why, obviously, and that I thought, well, yes, it was a technique, but it was a very well-worthwhile technique for students to learn, to help in their language learning.
I can remember just one specific student who voiced this objection. She said she thought it was a useful technique, but that wasn’t what she wanted to be doing in a language class. And when I asked her what she did want to be doing in a language class, then the answer was she wanted to be doing a lot more discussion.
So she didn’t want to be sitting and working on her own computer. She said ‘I can do that at home.’ And she wanted to be talking. And that’s also quite interesting, because I remember in the early classes I found it very, very difficult to actually stop the students from just working on their own computers and to get them to discuss what they had found.
Discussion
Maggie described one student who said she’d rather have discussion in a language class than corpus activities. However, Maggie comments in the interview that early on in her corpus classes she found it very difficult to stop students from working alone on their computers and had to persuade them to discuss their findings with other students!
Finally, Maggie was asked what she hoped students in her classes would learn about academic writing. She begins by discussing ‘general’ academic writing and the usefulness of getting students to explore their own field (or discipline), and then talks about the usefulness of corpora. As you listen, write notes on the different points she makes on the value of using corpora to explore academic writing.
Transcript
MAGGIE CHARLES
It’s very often held that there’s no such thing as general academic writing; you can’t teach general academic writing. Whereas my view is that, in reality, that’s what a lot of people have to teach, so we better find some ways of doing it.
And, in my view, one of the ways of doing it is to use that disciplinary variety in a very creative way, by getting students to explain what’s happening in their own field to someone who is in a different field.
It even works well ... In the second class, we had two people working together who were working in the same field, but even that works well because they found, for example, that they had estimated the frequency of ‘we’ as different. So, then, they checked it against their own corpus data, and I think they found that one of them made a better estimate than the other.
I suppose what I want them to do is that I want them to go away knowing something and able to do something which they either didn’t know before, thought they knew and have now discovered is not quite the case, and they need a take-home message which is quite clear and which is relevant to them and their thesis and their writing. They appreciate a corpus because it gives them this access to multiple, multiple examples.
One student from a few years ago puts every research article she reads straight into the corpus. So the last time I checked with her, she had over 400 articles in it – this is going to be quite a big corpus. And she said to me, when I asked her why, she said to me, ‘I’m more confident if I see 2000 hits than 20 hits.’ From the end of this course, they go away with their own corpus.
One of my major themes in getting them to build their own corpus is that they should be more autonomous; that they can be more independent learners. What we want to do is, essentially, make ourselves redundant. By the time they have done a year with me, or even if they’ve only done one term with me, if it’s this term, they will go away with something that is theirs – they can adapt it, they can grow it, they can use it whenever they want to, but they have the basis of the tool and the knowledge. And I think that really aids independent learning.
Certainly, a lot of the students that I get, I don’t think have ever thought of language as an object of study, and especially not as an object of study which can be carried out by computers. Okay. So, that, they tend to think of language as something that ‘Oh gosh, you’ve just got to go and learn it.’ Okay. Well, actually, you can take some shortcuts to discover what it would make sense to learn and the computer can help you do that.
So, that, one of the things that is particularly relevant for our students is that looking at the scrutinising of evidence – this, first of all, collection of evidence, which is your data, which is your corpus – then scrutinising it, analysing it, and drawing conclusions from it is exactly what we expect them to do, certainly when they are doing a research degree and probably also at third-year undergraduate level.
Discussion
You may have noted the following points from Maggie’s response.
- Using corpora and discussing findings with others helps students to understand disciplinary variation.
- Students learn something new about particular linguistic areas from their corpus investigations.
- Students ‘appreciate a corpus’ because they have access to lots of examples of language.
- Individuals leave the course with their own corpus, which they can use and add to. This helps them to be more independent learners.
- Students learn to think of language as an object of study. They learn that a corpus and computer software can help them to analyse linguistic evidence and to understand language.