On Teaching English Corpus Linguistics in Universities

On Teaching Corpus Linguistics in College English

I. Advantages of Corpus Linguistics

Before the rise of corpus linguistics, most of the ways of describing a language system were traditional and non-empirical, relying on the intuition of linguists. In recent years, however, corpus-based research has supplemented traditional descriptions of language systems by analyzing real language instances in large corpora, identifying a large number of linguistic structures that were previously overlooked or considered ungrammatical in the past. Corpus linguistics is good at revealing the most typical language features, discovering the rules of language use in real life, and reflecting the real face of language. For example, taking English as an example, a corpus can answer some crucial questions for English linguistics: what are the most commonly used words and phrases in English? What are the most used tenses? What are the most used verbs and nouns? Which words are their most regular collocations? How do people use modal verbs? Which words are used in informal situations? What is the size of the basic vocabulary people need to carry on everyday conversations? How do people use the grammatical structures of English? Are these structures used more or less frequently in different registers? Are the words that ***present*** with these grammatical structures of a certain semantic ****ness? These kinds of linguistic features and usage patterns revealed by corpus linguistics are extremely important for foreign language teaching, which can largely reduce the blindness of foreign language teaching and improve the efficiency of teaching.

Second, the rules of distribution of language asymmetry revealed by corpus linguistics

The frequency of English words in the discourse is very unbalanced but regular, and through the frequency statistics, corpus linguistics brings the asymmetric distribution characteristics of the language clearly in front of people. 95% of most written texts consist of 4,000 to 5,000 high-frequency words, of which the first 1,000 high-frequency words make up another 85% of the text. In spoken language, 50 high-frequency function words alone make up 60% of the text. According to research, the 700 highest-frequency words in the English language account for about 70% of English language usage. That means that 70% of the English that people use every day to listen and speak as well as read and write is made up of these 700 most common words. When the range is expanded to the first 1,500 words, the percentage of language use rises to 76%, meaning that an increase of 800 words increases the percentage by only 6%. By 2,500 words, the share reaches 80%, meaning that an increase of 1,000 words increases the share by only 4%. This data set revealed the asymmetric character of language and made the linguistic community aware of the importance of distinguishing between typical and atypical linguistic features. Since the 1960s, there has been an increasing number of corpus-based studies describing various dimensions of the language system, explaining the typicality features of the language system in many ways. Meanwhile, the high and low frequency distribution of word collocation forms can be clearly depicted through corpus investigations, distinguishing commonly used linguistic information from non-commonly used linguistic information, and helping people to extract the most valuable information from the complicated linguistic phenomena.

Third, the current situation of the treatment of linguistic features in university English teaching

The features of linguistic asymmetry revealed by corpus linguistics have made the linguistic community begin to think about some of these questions: Is the linguistic knowledge that teachers teach their students in the classroom, and that students are required to master by various exams, the language that is commonly used by most Anglo-Americans? A large number of foreign studies have found that there are considerable differences between the contents and order of arrangement of many foreign language textbooks and the actual languages spoken by the people. These studies compare the textbooks with the relevant words or structures in the corpus and find that some textbooks emphasize less common expressions while ignoring important usage. These studies include Kenned's (y1987) survey of quantity and frequency expressions, Hplmes's (1988) study of cognitive mood expressions, Ljung's (1990) comparative study of common vocabulary lists, and so on. All these studies have found a great discrepancy between the English described in university English textbooks and the English actually used, and have emphasized the need to use corpus information to modify the description of the language system in the textbooks in order to make them really present the full picture of the actual use of the language. At the same time, it also reflects that textbooks that do not faithfully describe the actual use of language can mislead learners and become one of the sources of learner errors. The findings of these studies also suggest that corpus information should be used to guide the development of syllabi and textbooks, so that more attention is paid to the common uses of the language system than to the less common ones.

Four: Implications of Corpus Linguistics for College English Teaching

The asymmetric features of language require English teachers to differentiate between typical and atypical features of language in teaching, and to pay attention to high-frequency words, high-frequency semantics and collocational forms of words, and high-frequency grammatical structures. From a statistical point of view, language items of higher frequency are generally those that learners are most likely to encounter and need to learn in language use. Linguists have long suggested that the more frequent language items should be learned first in order to reduce the learning burden and avoid confusion. Since native speakers have limited access to and time to learn the target language, and may learn only a drop in the ocean over the course of a lifetime, it is often crucial to make typical linguistic patterns the center of instruction. This approach can often yield twice the result with half the effort compared with a balanced approach to different linguistic phenomena. Up to now, the design of English syllabi and textbooks has mostly relied on traditional language descriptions based on limited anticipation, relying mainly on experience and subjective judgment to determine the difficulty, importance and learning sequence of linguistic features and vocabulary. This kind of university English syllabus designed on the basis of limited experience is often not precise enough. The findings and frequency information from the thesaurus should be widely applied to the important areas of foreign language teaching and learning such as syllabus design, textbook writing and classroom application. What the linguistic community has now reached **** understanding is that at the elementary and intermediate levels, high-frequency language features should be the focus of teaching rather than the more difficult ones in terms of textbook content, syllabus sequence, and teaching priorities. Therefore, the 'ideological shift from a balanced treatment of language features to an emphasis on typical language features is of great significance to the improvement of teaching quality. As instructors of teaching activities, teachers should also be aware of the fact that there are high and low frequency of language phenomena, and practically implement the principle of focusing on typical language phenomena in all aspects of teaching. The more frequent linguistic items should be the focus of teaching and should be emphasized by both teachers and students. This principle should also be reflected in tests and exercises, so as to avoid overly biased questions, questions that are detached from the actual use of the language, and tests on more remote words, linguistic phenomena and expressions. This may cause students to lose confidence in language learning due to a sense of failure and frustration. Teachers should also actively assist students to establish the concept of frequency of linguistic phenomena such as lexical frequency and semantic frequency in teaching, and help students to rationalize their study time. Therefore, corpus linguistics is an important tool for teachers and language learners. Over the past few decades, corpus research has accumulated a great deal of research results in areas such as vocabulary and grammar. All these resources can provide very valuable reference information for syllabus design. When designing college English syllabi, teachers can use corpus information to select teaching contents that reflect the typical features of the target language, arrange the teaching sequence and adjust the focus of the teaching contents.

V. Conclusion

Corpus linguistics provides quantitative evidence about the distribution of the composition of linguistic asymmetries, which can play a guiding role in the design of university English syllabi and the sequencing of different linguistic features in teaching materials, and also helps to raise awareness of the importance and priority of multiple learning tasks in teaching. The implication for university English teaching is that typical and atypical language features should be treated differently. However, the typicality of a linguistic feature, i.e., the frequency information of that feature, is not the only variable to be taken into account in university English teaching and syllabus design. Therefore, while emphasizing typicality, university English teaching should also take into account factors such as the differences between the mother tongue and the target language.

Author:Su Dongying Unit:College of Foreign Languages, Yinchuan Energy College