Corpora are of Little Practical Value to Most ELT Practitioners - Essay Example

Corpora are of little practical value to most ELT practitioners “– Analysis Introduction The importance of foreign language is catching hold in every country and more important is the knowhow of English language and ability to speak, listen and interpret it carefully because it being a universal language is the most common medium of communication between most of the people across different countries and culture. Dendrinos (cited in Cummins and Davison, 2007, p.130) expresses the influence of Anglo – American norms on linguistic and pedagogic and laments the monolingualism and monoculturalism of English Language Teaching. He further states that by not English one is excluded from anything of social importance. Identifying the importance of language as an important means of communication and other language related activities, language researchers and teachers use corpora as viable means of conducting practical classroom – centered research and meeting specific language teaching needs. Though the use of corpora in English language teaching has made a significant progress in recent times, it is assumed that corpora are of little practical importance to most ELT practitioners (Ghadessy, et al, 2001, p.208). Thus the present study is aimed to analyze the aforementioned statement with reference to corpus – based pedagogical activities. ELT Practitioners – Teaching pattern Languages evolve and develop over a period of time and they are used differently by various speakers. According to McDonough and Shaw (2003, p.4) the overall goal of the language teaching programme is mainly derived from an analysis of the reasons why a group of learners in a particular environment needs to learn English which can be stated in general, educational or specific norms. The curriculum for English Language Teaching may differ from country to country and in such circumstances the ELT practitioner needs to develop a framework based on the language teaching, for a country, an age group, whole school, a class or an individual. It is further stated that teachers are affected directly and indirectly by various factors upon which the curriculum is prepared like role of English in the country, school, materials, time, etc. which makes it clear that singular approach to English language teaching is not suitable in all conditions. According to Richards and Rodgers (2001, p.71) the quest for alternative to grammar based approach led to several other methods like communicative approaches as it didn’t focused on grammar as the core component of language instead focused on communication and making the classroom environment for authentic communication. Amongst various methods in ELT, Total Physical Response (TPR) is used by the practitioners as it is built around the coordination of speech and action which tries to teach language through physical activity. It reflects grammar based view of language. According to Asher (cited in Richards and Rodgers, 2001, p. 73) most of the grammatical structure of the target language and hundreds of vocabulary items can be learned from the skillful use of the imperative by the instructor. Saraswati (2004, p.18) mentioned that language acquisition depends on a chain of stimulus response activities where imitation, repetition, memorization, reward and reinforcement play a significant role which is part of the Behaviorist theory. Then there is Silent Way method of teaching devised by Caleb Gattengo where teacher’s role is to remain silent and encourage the participants to speak and produce as much language as possible. Another is Community Language Learning (CLL) developed by Charles A Curran and his associates which has been derived from client counselor relationship wherein the impetus lies on the teacher to give advice, assistance and support to the person who has some kind of problem in speaking English. CLL is the combination of innovative tasks and activities which include translation, group work, recording, transcription, analysis, reflection and observation, listening, and free conservation. Ray (2004, p.94) states that ELT practitioners have a significant role to play in the process of language by using the methods such as role play, informal talks, conversations, certain drills and exercises, etc. ELT practitioners across Europe have traditionally been committed to ‘stand and language ideologies’ with ideas of prescriptivism and the maintenance of ‘mutual intelligibility’ underpinning foreign language education (Kachru et al, 2009, p.229). There are numerous proven techniques and methods for teaching English language effectively used by the ELT practitioners. The ELT practitioners are provided with effective alternatives in case any one method of teaching is ineffective. Importance of Corpora A corpus is a large collection of texts in which one can look for multiple occurrences of a linguistic feature which is later displayed as concordance that allows students to access large amount of data in short time and in structured manner enabling the students to transform the resulting consciously or unconsciously made inductive observations to be tested and finally integrated into their knowledge system (Tenorio, 2007, p.142). It is agreed by most of the empirically oriented linguists that the advent of large, computerized corpora has revolutionized the linguistic description and analysis of English language (Mukherjee, n.d.). Corpus examples are essential in language learning as they expose students to the learning process to the kinds of sentences and vocabularies at an early age, which they will encounter while reading genuine texts in the language or in using the language in real communicative situations (McEnery and Wilson, 2001,p.120). The importance of corpus in language study is closely allied to the importance which is more related to empirical data that enables the practitioner to make statements which are objective and based on language as it really is rather than statements which is subjective and based upon the individuals own internalized cognitive perception. Corpus linguistics is a subset of activity within an empirical approach to linguistics that entails an empirical approach. The basic importance of corpora in speech research revolves around wide selection of variables and across variety of genres. Another benefit of spoken corpus is that it provides a sample of naturalistic speech rather than speech which has been elicited under artificial conditions (McEnery and Wilson, 2001). Mindt (as cited in McEnery and Wilson, 2001, p.112) demonstrated the role of corpus where it can be used to provide objective criteria for assigning meanings to linguistic items. According to Svartvik (1992, p.81), the value of acceptance of corpora is closely tied to the acceptance of the view that language cannot be separated from what the mind is and what the mind does and interacts. It is further stated that the collection and analysis of conversational corpora is absolutely essential to a fuller understanding of the language and the mind. Additionally corpora based observations and theorizing need to be supported with introspections, inventions and experiments. Mukherjee (n.d.) states that earliest and most significant impact that corpus linguistics had on language teaching can be found in lexicography. Corpora play an important role in language pedagogy which goes beyond simply providing more and better realistic examples of language usage. It is further mentioned that numerous scholars have used corpus data to look critically at existing language teaching materials wherein it was found that there is a considerable difference between what textbooks are teaching and how native speakers actually use language as mentioned in the corpora (McEnery and Wilson, 2001, p.120). Some of the other uses of corpora involve the study of linguistic creativity, the classification of speech presentation in novels, investigation of writer’s novel, the identification of keywords in Shakespeare’s plays, computer assisted readings of literary texts. Moreover the corpus based approach allows scholars to make both quantitative and qualitative analyses involving the investigation of semantic prosody, translational choices and translation shifts (Watson, 2008, p.197). Aijmer (2009, p.49) mentions that there are many benefits which can be gained from the use of corpora by the students even if it does not necessarily meet the objectives by integrating corpora into language courses which can serve multiple needs. However the most important thing is to allow students to encounter real language rather than made up examples. IT is further stated that corpora are invaluable for teachers where they can employ the tool in numerous ways such as to create exercises, demonstrate variation in grammar, and show how syntactic structures are used to signal differences in meaning and level of style, discuss near synonyms and collocations and give informed answers to students. According to Lindquist and Mair (2004, p.173) corpora has proved to be very successful as it has been viewed as highly valuable sources for the investigation of many aspects of the language system which is supported by the recent publication of Biber et al’s (1999) large corpus grammar which is testimony to the importance of corpora in language description and language. Tognini-Bonelli (2001, p.68) mentioned three popular ways of resolving the problem of the data not fitting the theory which are insulation, simplification and standardization and instantiation. Corpora form a particularly valuable basis for comparisons between an author, text or collection of texts and particular variety of language. Further corpora have found a particular role in examining the stylistics with most common use of looking at the differences between spoken language and written language apart from challenging the empirical and existing approaches to text typology. Corpora has number of features that make them important as source of data for linguistic research and the main important advantages include sampling and quantification, ease of access, better analysis, etc. (McEnery and Wilson, 2001, p.119). Corpus based approach takes advantage of computers capacity for fast, accurate and complex analyses, the extensive information about language use found in large collections of natural texts from multiple registers and the rich description that results from integrating quantitative findings and functional interpretations. However these advantages apply to individual linguistic features. It is further stated that application of corpus based techniques in lexicography makes it possible to study the collocations of words in a comprehensive way (Biber et al, 1998, p.233). It is evident that corpora are of important use in the linguistic research and more importantly in language pedagogy in English. However it has also been found that there are plenty of methods and techniques in practice for teaching language to students or participants which are effective. The corpus is being touted as one of the important material and tool in language pedagogical activity and hence it has been found necessary to evaluate the extent of use of corpus based activity in English language teaching. Corpus based pedagogical activity Romer (2006) mentions the direct approach to pedagogical corpora use where the teachers and learners get their hands on corpus data themselves, instead of relying on the researcher as a mediator or provider of the corpus based materials. The direct driven learning founded by Johns (cited in Romer 2006) to make the learner a linguistic researcher and confront him directly to the data facilitating the learners to work with concordances and consult corpora in an exploratory way. The major advantage of direct driven learning was immediate accessibility of authoritative information about what is acceptable in the language and about how particular words and phrases are used by competent English speakers. Further the indirect approach explains the use of corpora by teachers and learners and introduces corpus and concordances to the classroom with the help of mediator research. Granger et al (2002, p.121) mentioned that analysis of raw and grammatically annotated native corpora using the methods and tools of corpus linguistics has led to much better description of the English language in general. The corpus driven linguists have strong objections to corpus annotation which is closely associated with the second difference between the two approaches – attitudes towards existing theories and intuitions (McEnery, et al, 2006, p.16).. Corpora are of little practical value to most ELT practitioners - Analysis Carter et al (2007, p.191) mentioned that discussions in creativity in relation to language teaching and learning have tended to focus on issues of learners’ own creativity in relation to language learning processes. Romer (2005, p.275) has pointed out large number of discrepancies between course book and corpus wherein through comparative corpus driven analysis of large amounts of data uncovered some considerable inadequacies in pedagogical description. The author stressed upon the need to pay attention on the corpus driven strategy which highlighted the number of aspects related to use and teaching of progressiveness in order to reflect corpus evidence and adjust pedagogical language descriptions which may increase economy and efficiency and shall lead to improvement of language in teaching, but lot of precious time would be wasted in the ELT classroom by teaching uncommon language patterns and rather infrequent meanings of items. It is further mentioned that unless future comparative empirical studies on progressiveness in ‘school’ English and real English is carried out to back the findings, it would not be safe to call for a radical revision of the textbooks and depicting the textbooks of English teaching material in same way. It would be better if moderate changes are made in the textbooks and attention is paid to the most salient facts as in found in natural corpora. Corpus drive linguistics which shows the way language is typically used in natural discourse and among other things, reveals what items are frequent in which types of text, what are the words that are likely to occur in combination, or what is the meaning that particular item may have. In spite of the good strength of corpus driven research is pedagogical context has not been affected by the results of such research as observed by Mindt (cited in Romer, 2005) as teaching materials and especially textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language. Siedhofer (2003, p.78) mentioned that the combination of the prestige which corpus linguistics in enjoying, in the area of linguistic description with the undiminishing popularity of concepts and slogans such as authenticity, real language and native speaker discourse have resulted in natural alliance between linguistic description and pedagogic prescription. However Widdowson (cited in Siedhofer, 2003) argued that though the corpus description captures the reality of the language from the users’ point of view, it does not suggest that it meets the conditions of pedagogical effectiveness. Widdowson (cited in Siedhofer, 2003) further mentioned that language teaching cannot simply be based on descriptive facts, though they are facts of attested frequency off usage emerging from text analysis or facts of psychological reality. The relevance of corpus linguistics is not self evident and need to be established by reference to pedagogic criteria. Though there are numerous ways where corpora can be helpful in assisting the ELT practitioners, the time that can be set aside for integrating corpus exploration into regular language courses such as grammar, translation and written and spoken proficiency is most of the less and restricted and additionally the time for actual teacher led training in a language laboratory will probably be cut down to minimum (Aijmer, 2009, p.142). It is pertinent to mention here that corpora do not contain whole texts does not facilitate their use for the study of internal text structuring (McEnery and Wilson, 2001, p.119). Tribble (cited in Mukherjee, n.d.) confirms that not many teachers are using corpora in their classrooms which gives an evidence that there may be a clash between the corpus linguists enthusiasm about the language – pedagogical use of corpora on the one hand and the average teachers reluctance to use corpora in their classroom. The reason for the reluctance could be analyzed through the opinion of Granger (cited in Mukherjee, n.d) wherein it was found that that main fields of application of corpus data are materials, syllabus design, and classroom methodology; all of which are under progress only with the exception of ELT dictionaries. It is further stated that number of concrete corpus informed achievements is not equivalent to the existing publications on ELT which fails in advocating the use of corpus based pedagogical activity in ELT (Mukherjee, n.d.). It is evident from all the literature mentioned under the methods used by ELT practitioners, importance of corpora and its relation in pedagogical activities; it is found there are numerous methods which can be used in ELT classroom by the practitioners. Additionally, Corpora is associated with numerous complications like time, flexibility, use of words, etc. which makes it difficult for the practitioner to use in the classroom with limited time for them complete their pedagogical activities. Further it has also been found that corpora does not include all the texts, phrases or sentences so that it can be useful to clarify the doubts and find the answers. Instead it is made-up of only those words which are entered and the other words are left out thus reducing the reliability of using it extensively in the classroom and achieving output through corpus linguistic may not be possible. Moreover the corpus linguistic is referred as under progress activity by Granger (cited in Mukherjee, n.d.) which resulted in reluctance in certain sections of the practitioners. Corpora with so much ability to perform things is of little importance to the ELT practitioners as it is does not contains every word or text in the world and hence the practitioner will have to refer to the dictionary to find the answer which will result in waste of time. And with other alternative methods available which are proven to be successful in English language teaching classrooms and is willingly accepted by ELT practitioners, it is doubtful that corpora may be used to the fullest extent in the process of ELT. Therefore ‘corpora are of little practical value to most ELT practitioners’. References 1. Aijmer K (2009) Corpora and language teaching, John Benjamins Publishing Company, US 2. Biber D, Conrod B and Reppen R (1998) Corpus linguistics: investigating language structure and use, Cambridge University Press, US 3. Cummins J and Davison, C (2007) International handbook of English language teaching, Part 1, Springer, US 4. Ghadessy, J, Henry A, and Roseberry, R L. (2001) Small corpus studies and ELT: theory and practice, John Benjamins Publishing Company, US 5. Granger, S. Hung J and Petch – Tyson, S (2002) Computer learner corpora, second language acquisition, and foreign language teaching, John Benjamins Publishing Company, US 6. Kachru, B.B., Kachru Y and Nelson C (2009) The Handbook of World Englishes, Wiley-Blackwell, US 7. Lindquist H and Mair C (2004) Corpus approaches to grammaticalization in English, John Benjamins Publishing Company, US 8. McDonough J and Shaw C (2003) Materials and methods in ELT: a teachers guide, Ed. 2, Wiley Blackwell, US 9. McEnery T and Wilson A (2001) Corpus linguistics: an introduction, Ed. 2, Edinburgh University Press, UK 10. McEnery, T. Xiao R and Tono Y (2006) Corpus-based language studies: an advanced resource book, Taylor & Francis, US 11. Mukherjee J (n.d.) Corpus linguistics and language pedagogy: The state of the art – and beyond. Giessen. 12. 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