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SPGSC PAPER B 300113
The University of Edinburgh
The Moray House School of Education
School Postgraduate Studies Committee
30 January 2013
New Course Proposal: Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching
Brief description of the paper
Proposal for a new course for MSc TESOL.
Action requested
Approval
Resource implications
Does the paper have resource implications? No
Risk assessment
Does the paper include a risk analysis? No
Equality and diversity
Does the paper have equality and diversity implications? No
Freedom of information
Can this paper be included in open business? Yes
Any other relevant information
No
Originator of the paper
Joan Cutting and Brona Murphy
November 2012
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SPGSC PAPER B 300113
Course Information
Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching 2012-2013
Lecturers: Dr Bróna Murphy and Dr Joan Cutting
Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
Course description
This course is aimed at prospective language teachers who have not worked with
corpora before. The course will introduce the students to corpus linguistics as a means
of investigating language and will explore a range of corpora, spoken and written,
across a variety of Englishes, from British and American English to Singaporean
English. The course will focus, in particular, on how corpus-based tools and
methodologies can be applied in the classroom. It will concentrate on the teaching of
skills (speaking, listening, writing, in particular), systems as well as sociolinguistics
and pragmatics. It will draw on the use of tools such as word frequency lists, keyword
lists, cluster lists, as well as concordance lines, in order to look at form and functional
patterning in language. It will focus not only on how the teacher can use corpus
linguistics in the classroom to create materials but also how students can be
encouraged to use corpora themselves.
Aims and objectives
On successful completion of this module, students should have:
 an understanding of the basic tools and methodologies surrounding corpus
linguistics
 an understanding of the different corpora which are available
They should be able to:
 develop and refine a query to extract data from a corpus
 present and discuss corpus results on areas in relation to reading, writing,
speaking, listening, vocabulary, sociolinguistics and pragmatics
 apply findings in a second language teaching context
Structure of the Sessions
1 hour lecture
2 hour workshop (in the lab)
Programme
Week
Course Content
Week 1



Introduction I to Corpus Linguistics
Evaluating corpus-based materials
Introduction, demonstration and practice of Wordsmith Tools

Practice: Demonstration and use of corpora.
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SPGSC PAPER B 300113
Week 2

Examining vocabulary and collocations and language teaching
Practice: Collocations; concordancer
Week 3:

Investigating grammar and language teaching
Week 4:

Practice: syntactic structures and patterning
Spoken discourse: analysing pragmatic markers, response tokens and hedging
Week 5
 Practice: Finding and analysing response tokens
 Written discourse: analysing genres
Week 6
Week 7:
Week 8:

Practice: Exploring the discourse of academic assignments

Corpus linguistics and pragmatics

Practice: Examining politeness and language teaching
 Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics
 Practice: age, gender and discourse
 Creating corpus-based materials
 Concluding lecture.

Practice: using the corpus for materials preparation
Assessment
In part 1 of your assignment, you are required to present and discuss findings obtained
from a corpus-based investigation you have decided to carry out. It can relate to at
least one or more of the following areas: speaking, writing, grammar, vocabulary,
sociolinguistics, pragmatics (2000 words)
In part 2, using your findings, or based on insights from your findings, you must
prepare a lesson which is corpus-based and suitable for a particular cohort of students
you have in mind. You will discuss and evaluate your corpus-based activities and
provide insights into the choices you have made in their design, as well as the
challenges encountered in putting the lesson together. You will be required to refer to
literature to support your decisions (2000 words). As part 1 and part 2 are connected,
you will be assessed on the overall assignment.
Word count: 4000 words, excluding data and appendices
Assessing Corpora on-line: tools and websites
Corpora:
British National Corpus (BNC) : http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
Simple search of BNC: http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html
WebCorp: http://www.webcorp.org.uk/
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SPGSC PAPER B 300113
Lancaster Corpus of Children’s Project Writing
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/lever/index.htm
Bank of English sampler: http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx and
http://web.quick.cz/jaedth/Introduction%20to%20CCS.htm
Business Letter Corpus: http://www.someya-net.com/concordancer/index.html
Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/
COCA Corpus: http://www.americancorpus.org/
SCOTS:
Scottish
Corpus
of
Texts
and
Speech:
http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/about/
The Oxford Text Archive holds a large number of freely available specialised
corpora: http://ota.ahds.ac.uk
HCRC Maptask Corpus: http://hcrc.ed.ac.uk/maptask/interface/
Tools:
Simple concordancing programme: http://www.textworld.com/scp/
ConcApp concordancer: http://www.edict.com.hk/PUB/concapp/
AntConc: http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc_index.html
Online concordancer for the Corpus of Contemporary American English, BNC, TIME
corpus of American English, Oxford English Dictionary, Corpus del Español, Corpus
do Português:
http://corpus.byu.edu
Useful websites :
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/clmt/w3c/corpus_lling/content/introductio
n.html
Information
on
Corpus
Building:
http://www.corpus.bham.ac.uk/corpusbuilding.shtml
Introduction
to
Corpus
Linguistics:
http://www.engl.polyu.edu.hk/corpuslinguist/corpus.htm
David Lee’s website: http://devoted.to.corpora
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