Small Corpus Studies and ELT: Theory and Practice (review)

The preface of this volume defines issues related to the size of the corpus while the introduction justifies its publication in the present context of corpus research and application.

In Section 1, Ch. 1 refers to the use of language in some real situations and shows how analysis of corpora can reveal some important linguistic issues that can alter understanding of language and discourse.

In Section 2, Ch. 2 demonstrates how using language processing tools on small corpora can generate new output to be used in second-language classroom teaching as well as for evaluating learner’s vocabulary. Ch. 3 argues that using text analysis software on small corpora can extract a great deal of new information required to enhance the comprehensibility of a literary text.

In Section 3, Ch. 4 shows that applying concordances to specialized text corpora can bring out examples of linguistic patterns useful for designing course books and learning materials. Ch. 5 argues that linguistic information obtained from a corpus belonging to a single genre can be effective for preparing useful language-teaching materials. Ch. 6 argues that information about the use of various functional units in specific lexico-grammatical patterns in certain small corpora can help in examining language variation across genres within a given discourse area. Ch. 7 demonstrates how analysis of the textual genre of personal advertisements can provide important clues for making comparisons between the languages preferred by men and women as well as for identifying cultural backgrounds that may help in shaping their preferred linguistic choices.

In Section 4, Ch. 8 shows how classroom investigation of small corpora annotated with features of discourse and wording have been useful in improving language proficiency as well as in promoting language awareness among ESL students. Ch. 9 examines a corpus of definition sentences, points out the limitations of functional grammar, and advocates local grammars devised from specialized corpora.

In Section 5, Ch. 10 describes the theoretical background and practical experience of creating a multilingual corpus as well as its application in translation and discourse analysis. Ch. 11 proposes a crosslinguistic comparative analysis on some parallel corpora that might help learners explore the ways language is used for achieving particular communicative goals. Ch. 12 uses parallel corpora to compare thematic organization in source and target languages to find the degree of correlation between the two, which may help in teaching, translating, and identifying text-types across languages.

In Section 6, Ch. 13 shows how findings of collocational patterns, pragmatic appropriateness, and discourse features from learner corpora can be coupled with expert corpora to design teaching methodology and materials. Ch. 14 argues that both teacher and learner require knowledge of content, writing process, context, and language system for writing a text and advocates comparative analysis of corpus methodologies as a strategy for developing such capacity.

In sum, the volume highlights the relevance of small corpora in both language learning and teaching. In addition to the description of basic corpus analysis tools, it covers various issues (compilation and use of learner corpus, comparison of genres, crosslinguistic comparison, teaching-materials design, description of local and functional grammars) important for language education and research.