Reading Response Nine

Reading Prompt #9
 BLACKBOARD - Barbierie, F. (2005). What is Corpus Linguistics?

Essential Teacher (Compleat Links).

 BLACKBOARD - Conrad, S. (2000). Will Corpus Linguistics

Revolutionize Grammar Teaching in the 21st Century? TESOL Quarterly, 34(3), 548-560.

What is Corpus Linguistics? And why are some language teachers so excited about it? What applications can you envision for your current or future classroom?

"Corpus Linguistics, the empirical study of language relying on computer assisted techniques to anaglyze large, principle databases of naturally occurring language." (Conrad p. 548) An example of Corpus Linguistics is a concordancer. The advantage to Corpus Linguistics in teaching grammar is that, as a teacher, you can show your students how grammar is used as a natural occurance in spoken language, because how we speak the language is often different from how we would write it. Also, language is used differently in different written settings; such as newspaper writing, novel writing, or academic writing. By using Corpus Linguistics we can see how grammar and language are used in the spoken form. I believe this broadens the use of grammatical forms for our students, and they won't be bound to learning just the way grammar is used in it's written form. As a teacher, Corpus Linguistics and Concordancers give us a great advantage. We can illustrate to our students the many uses of grammar in the spoken language. We can also compare for them written uses and spoken uses. This may be helpful for them academically.