IBLT Wk 6 Corpus Summary

Gloria Lee (이가람)

Wk6-IBLT summary

2012-10-14

Perez-Paredas 2011 Uses of corpora

Reinhardt 2010

Reinhardt’s paper offers rough and expansive knowledge about relationship between the corpus and L2 pedagogy. According the Reinhardt (2010) “corpus-informed L2 teaching has not spread far” (p.240). To give out the reason why L2 teaching does not reflect corpus linguistic so much, he starts off by early debates and discussion about the corpus. Corpus language have meaningful and authentic language that it seemed like it is relevant to learners need in terms of learners’ development (Reinhardt, 2010). However, there were some criticisms to corpora. One, it “cannot and not tell us everything there is to understand about language use” (Reinhardt, 2010, p. 242) Another criticism is corpora data are mostly very native speaker like which the learners will never attain that it may disempower the learners and reduce their agency in learning process (Reinhardt, 2010). Finally, he showed 4 reasons that why corpora and L2 pedagogy did not spread together. It is because that corpus research has been exaggerated by the researchers and corpora do not capture authenticity or real context in a language. Thus, corpora can be just as prescriptive as other approaches (Reinhardt, 2010). However, corpus findings did made an small innovation in L2 learning and Reinhardt introduced data-driven learning (DDL) which used corpus technique in L2 classroom. As he was introducing DDL he mentioned that learners may be overwhelmed by the huge number of same lines repeated over and over that teacher need to train the learners develop “researchers’ mindset” which means they have to have analytic mind (Reinhardt, 2010, p. 244). In the last part of the paper, Reinhardt suggested future potentials of corpus data. According to Susan Conrad (2000), corpus linguist should direct research into L2 pedagogical implication, and the findings should be part of the picture and not a panacea. The findings also should be expected as something that can be integrated into L2 pedagogy not something that can revolutionize it. Finally, she mentioned teacher themselves should be willing to drop traditional grammar teaching (Conrad, 2000, as cited from Reinhardt, 2010). He ended his paper by saying if the corpora material was more numerous, accessible, user friendly, and preferably web-based, corpus data would have had more impact on L2 teaching (Reinhardt, 2010).

In contrast, Perez-peredes’ paper showed close observation of students behavior on using corpus program under certain situations. The actual research question was “whether learner interaction with corpus-based resources differ under different corpus consultation conditions” (Perez-peredes, 2011). Therefore, the research was observing students’ computer-tracked behavior in guided and non-guided corpus group. The guided consultation group had a specific direction of how to use corpus and the other group had to do their own. The researcher looked at number of browser event launched, different websites visited, activities completed, number of BNC searches, and number of words, wildcards, and tags per search. The result was the experiment group which was guided corpus group had higher number in everything except the number of activities completed. Perez-peredes (2011) mentioned that this may be because the EG searched BNC almost three times more than CG.

           I liked Reinhardt paper much better than Perez-Paredes’ paper. While Reinhardt’s paper showed overall explanation about the relationship between corpus and L2 pedagogy, Perez-Paredes’ paper focused more on explaining learners’ behavior using corpus data under different conditions. Even though I had a very little idea about the function of corpus and its use, Reinhardt paper was very easy to understand and follow however, Perez-Paredes’ paper was little confusing to focus. It did not offer definition of specific terms and lacked enough explanation. I had hard time to follow and understand. I think the author just assumed the reader have this much of basic knowledge to understand.  

           Thus, I have a few clarification questions and application questions. From Perez-Paredes’ paper, I did not understand what BNC was. Also, one of the searching categories was number of words, wild card, and tags. I did understand the words searching but did not get what wild card and tags were. For the application question, if the corpus were to applied in a L2 class room how much of authenticity in the corpus data and material can a teacher allow for the students. I thought as authentic as it is; it is hard for teachers to decide how much authenticity he/she can have in L2 class.