An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999) will also serve language teachers 
well by providing a basis for deciding which language features and structures are 
important and also how various features and structures are used. For the first time, 
teachers and materials writers can have a basis for selecting the material that is 
being presented and for the claims that are being made about linguistic features. 
Rather than basing pedagogical decisions on intuitions and/or sequences that 
have appeared in textbooks over the years, these decisions can now be grounded 
on actual patterns of language use in various situations (such as spoken or written, 
formal or casual situations).
There are several works that encourage teachers to explore the use of corpora 
in the language classroom (Flowerdew and Tong, 1994; Johns, 1994; Barnbrook, 
1996; Wichmann et al., 1997; Simpson and Swales, 2001; O’Keefe, McCarthy and 
Carter, 2007). Exploring Spoken Language, by Carter and McCarthy (1997), was the 
first widely available textbook to combine the use of corpus material with language 
instruction. The challenge now is how best to translate frequency information 
and knowledge about patterns of language use into classroom materials.
*MonoConcPro available at www.athel.com; WordSmith Tools available from Oxford University Press 
http://www.oup.com/elt/global/isbn/6890; Vocabulary analysis programs by Paul Nation (RANGE and 
WORD) available at http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/software.htm. Lextutor available at http://www.lextutor.ca/.

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102 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
Bringing Corpora into the Language Classroom
Corpus-based information can be brought to bear on language teaching in two 
ways. First, teachers can shape instruction based on corpus-based information. 
They can consult corpus studies to gain information about the features that they 
are teaching. For example, if the focus of instruction is conversational English, 
teachers could read corpus investigations on spoken language to determine which 
features and grammatical structures are characteristic of conversational English. 
Instruction could then be shaped by the features that students are most likely to 
encounter. If the focus of instruction is a particular grammatical structure, corpus-
based studies can provide a picture of the range of use of that particular structure, 
identifying lexical and pragmatic co-occurrence patterns associated with it. If 
teachers have a corpus available, they can make their own enquiries into the use 
of language features that they are teaching.
A second way that corpus information can be brought into the language 
classroom is by having learners interact with corpora. This can take place in one 
of two ways. If computer facilities are adequate, learners can be actively involved 
in exploring corpora; if adequate facilities do not exist, teachers can bring in 
printouts or results from corpus searches for use in the classroom. An example 
of this type of activity is provided in the Hands-on Activity at the end of this 
chapter.
It is worth noting here that the use of concordancing tasks in the classroom 
is a matter of some controversy – strongly advocated by those who favour an 
inductive or data-driven approach to learning (Johns, 1994), but criticized by 
others who argue that it is difficult to guide students appropriately and efficiently 
in the analysis of vast numbers of linguistic examples (Cook, 1998). Clearly, there 
is a need for classroom-based research and experimentation on the effectiveness of 
exposing language students to corpora and concordance tools. Concrete evidence 
about how effective these methods are will only become apparent over time, once 
enough teachers have experimented with the use of corpora as reference sources 
and learning tools.
Examples of Corpus-based Classroom Activities
The creation of appropriate, worthwhile corpus-based teaching materials takes 
time, careful planning and access to a few basic tools and resources. All the 
activities described in this section assume access to a computer, texts and to a 
concordancing package, but the activities do not require a sophisticated skills or 
computer programming ability. Several vocabulary activities can be generated 
through simple frequency lists and concordance output (Donley and Reppen, 
2001). If the teacher has the ability to scan or obtain an electronic version of the 
texts that are being read by the students, frequency lists generated from these 
texts may be used to identify and prioritize vocabulary words that need to be 
taught. If too many words are unknown, then the teacher might decide to wait 
and introduce the text later, when students are more prepared to cope with the 
vocabulary demands of the text. Frequency lists can also be a starting point for 
students to group words by grammatical category (for example, verb, nouns, 
etc.) or semantic categories. In addition, students could do activities that explore 
how to change words with various suffixes (for example, nation to national to