Exploring Corpora for ESP Learning (Studies in Corpus Linguistics)

Exploring Corpora for ESP Learning

Studies in Corpus Linguistics SCL focuses on the use of corpora throughout language study, the development of a quantitative approach to linguistics, the design and use of new tools for processing language texts, and the theoretical implications of a data-rich discipline. General Editor Elena Tognini-Bonelli Consulting Editor Wolfgang Teubert Advisory Board Michael Barlow

Graeme Kennedy

University of Auckland

Victoria University of Wellington

Robert de Beaugrande

Geoffrey Leech

Douglas Biber

University of Lancaster

North Arizona University

Anna Mauranen

Chris Butler

University of Helsinki

University of Wales, Swansea

John Sinclair

Sylviane Granger

The Tuscan Word Centre

University of Louvain

Piet van Sterkenburg

M. A. K. Halliday

Institute for Dutch Lexicology, Leiden

University of Sydney

Jan Svartvik

Susan Hunston

University of Lund

University of Birmingham

John Swales

Stig Johansson

University of Michigan

Oslo University

H-Z. Yang Jiao Tong University, Shanghai

Volume 21 Exploring Corpora for ESP Learning by Laura Gavioli

Exploring Corpora for ESP Learning

Laura Gavioli University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam
/
Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Cover illustration from original painting Random Order by Lorenzo Pezzatini, Florence, 1996.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Laura Gavioli Exploring Corpora for ESP Learning / Laura Gavioli. p. cm. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics, issn 1388–0373 ; v. 21) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. English language--Study and teaching--Foreign speakers. 2. English language--Study and teaching--Data processing. 3. English language-Discourse analysis--Data processing. 4. Computational linguistics. PE1128.A2 G33 2005 428.0071--dc22 2005055561 isbn 90 272 2292 4 (Hb; alk. paper)

© 2005 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Key to abbreviations and acronyms

xi

A note for the reader

xi

Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Why this book? 1 1.2 Corpora and “models” of language 3 1.3 Why ESP settings? 5 1.4 The corpora in this book 6 1.4.1 Small corpora and specialized corpora 6 1.4.2 Description of the corpora used here 8 1.5 A word about concordances and concordancing tools 11 1.6 Which learners? 12 1.7 How the book is organized 13 Chapter 2 Corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning: A background 2.1 Language corpora in language pedagogy: The 90s debate 17 2.1.1 Critical viewpoints 17 2.1.2 The contribution of corpus analysis to language pedagogy 20 2.2 Corpus analysis as a tool for language teachers 22 2.2.1 Corpus analysis and syllabus design 23 2.2.2 Supporting teachers’ explanations 25 2.3 Corpus analysis as a tool for language learners 27 2.3.1 The Data-Driven Learning approach 27 2.3.2 Question 1: Should the teacher guide the learners? 29 2.3.3 Question 2: Learners or researchers? 30 2.3.4 Question 3: Is the result worth the effort? 32 2.4 Conclusion 33

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Table of contents

Chapter 3 Theoretical premises for teachers and learners 3.0 Introduction 35 3.1 Learners looking at concordance data: What do they see? 36 3.2 Language as idiom vs. language as a logical system 41 3.3 The contribution of corpus work to a “new” idea of language compositionality 42 3.3.1 The open-choice principle and the idiom principle 43 3.3.2 The search for units of meaning 44 3.3.3 “Unusuality” and creativity 47 3.4 Learners, “idioms” and corpus work 49 3.5 Conclusion 50 Chapter 4 Corpus work, ESP and language learners 4.0 Introduction: From small to specialized corpora 53 4.1 ESP and specialised corpora: A happy marriage 55 4.1.1 ESP, quantitative data and corpus analysis: A natural development 55 4.1.2 ESP and corpus work 56 4.2 Specialised language and specialized teaching purposes 60 4.3 The continuum between specialized and general corpora 63 4.3.1 Register variation across genres 63 4.3.2 Identifying specificity 65 4.4 Specialized language corpora and language learning 67 4.5 Conclusion 69 Chapter 5 Guiding the learners to work with corpora and corpus data 5.0 Introduction 71 5.1 Type of material: Samples vs. examples 72 5.1.1 Task 1: Looking at the concordance lines as samples 74 5.2 “What to look for” in a concordance: Recurrence and typicality 76 5.2.1 Task 2: Focusing the students’ attention on recurrent patterns 80 5.3 Correlating output data and corpus texts 82 5.3.1 Task 3: Corpus data and corpus content 82 5.3.2 Follow-up of Task 3: Leading students to create corpora 84 5.4 Conclusion 85

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Table of contents 

Chapter 6 Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts: Spies in action 6.0 Introduction 87 6.1 Corpora and ESP learners: “Spies” 88 6.2 Using a small corpus of specialized texts to discover technical concepts 90 6.2.1 A medical word: The case of the acronym “RIBA” 6.2.2 A word from economics: The case of “bid” 94 6.2.3 Conclusion 98 6.3 From a single corpus to more corpora: Comparing data 99 6.3.1 How specialized is a specialized word? The case of the word “disorder” 100 6.3.2 Exploring corpora in different languages: Contrasting English and Italian data 104 6.4 Interacting with “the authorities”: Completing or contrasting explanations from reference materials and the teacher 110 6.4.1 The case of the progressive tense in medical research articles 111 6.5 Exploring corpora to produce texts 114 6.5.1 Translating a medical abstract 114 6.5.2 Writing out a political speech 119 6.6 Conclusion: From spies to “double-agents”? 122

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91

Chapter 7 Concluding remarks 7.1 Three answers? 127 7.1.1 If learners are to behave as data analysts, what should be the role of the teacher? 127 7.1.2 Learners or researchers? 129 7.1.3 Is the effort a worthwhile one? 131 7.2 Corpus work and pedagogy: Old or new questions? 133 7.3 Future developments 134 7.3.1 Tools and teaching/ materials 135 7.3.2 Corpus-based dictionaries and learners 136 7.3.3 Corpus work and teaching/learning skills 137 7.3.4 Serendipity 138

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7.3.5 Understanding “deviance” 139 7.3.6 Recurrence, deviance and language awareness 140 7.4 A concluding wish 142 Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Appendix 4 Appendix 5

145 147 153 157 159

References Index

165 175

Acknowledgments

The idea of this book was born at the birth of my son, Franco, and was completely revised at the birth of my daughter, Elena. The book is dedicated to them and to their daddy. Throughout these years – they are now 11 and 6 – many people have helped me to look after them and to enable the book to be written. As most womenparents know and probably as many men-parents are learning to know, we writers and researchers are sometimes at least as grateful to our nannies and family helpers as we are to the most distinguished scholars who have provided feedback on our writing. In my case, a whole page would not be enough to mention all the people who have helped me. So I hope the following lines will capture how indebted and privileged I feel: from the deepest well of my heart, I wish to say “thank you” to all those who have shown me their interest, attention, trust and love during these years.

Key to abbreviations and acronyms

EAP EFL EGP ELT ESP LSP CALL

English for Academic Purposes English as a Foreign Language English for General Purposes English Language Teaching English for Specific Purposes Language for Specific Purposes Computer Assisted Language Learning

A note for the reader All the web addresses cited in this book were last consulted on 14/10/2005. Some of the addresses have changed repeatedly through the years. Updated addresses can (often very easily) be found using publicly available search engines and typing in the name of the tool, corpus or service that is referred to.

Chapter 1

Introduction

. Why this book? While corpus studies have progressed and expanded enormously in the last ten years and involved various aspects of applied linguistics, including language teaching, learners’ language and translation teaching,1 the use of corpora as tools in the hands of teachers and learners is moving on very hesitatingly and, as observed by Kennedy (2004), three decades of research on electronic corpora have had surprisingly little influence on language curriculum contents. While, as Cook observes (1998: 57), the leap from linguistic research to pedagogy is, generally speaking, far from straightforward, the very richness and complexity of topics introduced by corpus linguistics seems to make it even harder. On the one hand, there are still problems of corpus availability. While more and more corpora have been made increasingly available over the last few years, corpora created for small ELT2 projects are far less so (with the single exception of the MicroConcord corpora, Murrison-Bowie 1993) and it is still unclear which size and types of corpora may suit the classroom context. On the other hand, the amount and type of data provided by corpus concordancing appear, at first glance, daunting for teachers and learners, leading them to wonder whether working with such data is really worth the effort. Corpus research has also provided interesting possibilities for materials production (see e.g. Thurstun & Candlin 1998; Tan 2002b), yet such potential does not seem to have fully reached the classroom, and while on the one hand there are not many specific tools created for didactic use, on the other hand there is very little request from teachers and learners, who either ignore the possibility of using corpora inside classroom activities or do not see their relevance for teaching/learning. The main aim of this book is to discuss the relevance of corpus work for learners of English as a foreign language and this volume is directed to all those who believe that taking the point of view of the learners into consideration may be important for their job: materials’ designers, teachers and applied linguists in general. I argue that analysing corpora, restricted in the range of the text-

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

types and topics collected, can be a useful learning activity, particularly for learners of ESP. Corpora are collections of texts in electronic form which can be analyzed to highlight features that are recurrent in the corpus itself. Small, specialized corpora of the type discussed in this book may provide a source to get an access to uses of specialized language. Analysing corpus data, from either large or more restricted corpora, though, has a series of both theoretical and methodological implications that have to be made explicit to teachers and learners who want to approach such data. In this book, I discuss some of these implications and I provide suggestions to guide teachers and learners to deal with corpus data. The leap from making such implications explicit to making them practical for the classroom is, again, not straightforward. My purpose here is to show that corpus linguistics theory and methodology involve interesting pedagogical insights which teachers and learners may fruitfully develop in their activities. This book constitutes an attempt to look at what learners “learn” by doing corpus work and my aim is that of highlighting their learning process. The process of learning through corpus use, I believe, suggests issues that may be interesting to be taken into consideration in, e.g., grading activities and tasks inside ESP or EFL curricula, the issue of integrating corpus work and work on dictionaries, grammars and/or textbooks, the use of corpus work for the development of language skills as well as the whole and complex issue of language awareness. I discuss the potential interest of re-thinking these issues by integrating them with corpus work in Chapter 7 in this book. This volume is based on teaching experiences with groups of students performing corpus analysis and on two main observations: a) that this type of work provides students with a useful source of information about features of language they want to know more about and b) that the process of “search-anddiscovery” implied in the method of corpus analysis may facilitate language learning. In this respect, the approach discussed here is a learning, rather than a teaching approach, insofar as it largely relies on attempts to enable the learners themselves to perform corpus work profitably in their own language learning activities, with the teacher functioning as an organizer of such activities. In this respect, the suggestions for teachers are mainly provided in terms of closer awareness of what corpus analysis is and what it involves from a learner’s point of view. Translating this into actual teachers’ practice takes the process a step forward. While I show cases of teachers and learners interacting in the classroom with concordance data, and while I suggest some practical tasks to guide learners in using concordance data, these are only examples and it is up to in-

Chapter 1. Introduction

dividual teachers to decide how similar activities can actually be managed and reconstructed in and for their local teaching settings. Here, I provide examples of learning tasks involving the use of corpora that colleagues of mine and I myself have performed with various groups of students over the past 10 years. The purpose of these examples is twofold. On the one hand, they show ways in which corpus work may enrich the learners’ experience in learning lexis, grammar and other formal aspects of language and at the same time re-shape their view of what grammar is all about. On the other, they provide ground for discussing methodological issues involved in using corpus tools for language learning. These are two key issues in this book. I do not contrast corpus-based activities with other types of language learning activities and thus I do not provide any evaluation about “which may be better”. Following Fillmore (1992: 35), my view is that they can be largely complementary and that they need each other.

. Corpora and “models” of language One controversial issue in the debate about the role of corpus work in teaching and learning is determining which variety of English a corpus should contain or represent to be suitable for a teaching environment, and a lot of discussion has attempted to define whether or not corpora for EFL or ESP should only contain texts by native speakers, and if so, whether they should be only British and American or otherwise. The debate involves two distinct positions. On the one hand it is assumed that many interactions in spoken English (see Carter 1998: 50) as well as scientific English (see Swales 1990: 96–102) are carried out between non-native speakers. It would thus seems unrealistic and unnecessary to expect learners to acquire native-speaker English (Prodromou 1996). On the other hand, when students were asked which target norm of English they want to approximate in their own usage, most of them seem to favour British or American English (see Mukherjee forthcoming, and also Quirk 1990; Kachru 1991; Berns et al. 1998; Phillipson 1999 on the more general debate). It seems to me that both positions assume that the texts (or parts of texts) contained in corpora are used by the students as language models to either reproduce or imitate. I believe that this is rather a restrictive view of corpora for both language description and language teaching and learning, and that it overlooks the potential of using corpora and interpreting the data interactively, taking into account the analysts’ interests and purposes, be the analyst a researcher, a teacher or a learner.

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

There are a couple of arguments I would like to mention to support the latter point. First, the quantity of concordance data. Even with corpora that are considered “small”, the instances of search words or expressions can run to hundreds. Most often, the recurrent patterns of usage that are identified by analyzing a concordance sheet are the result of a comparison between many instances and (in part at least) an interpretation of the analyst who is looking at the concordance for some particular purpose. While it is necessary to know whether we are looking at a corpus of British or American or Chinese English to avoid the risk of over-generalising, given the multiplicity of occurrences that it provides, a concordance can hardly be read as “a model” and the patterns of usage it suggests are often the fruit of an interaction between the analyst and the data. Second, there are already a good number of corpora, their number is increasing and their designs are getting more and more diversified. This gives analysts the possibility to, first, choose the corpus they find most suitable for their own purposes and second to compare results from different corpora, thus increasing the probability of looking at the material critically (see also van Rij-Heiligers forthcoming). In the many years I have been working with students (and for that matter Italian colleagues as well) in the attempt to see whether concordance materials answered their queries about the English language, I have found continued resistance towards treating corpus instances as models. As the concordance output is virtually illegible without analysis and interpretation, it is unlikely that concordance readers accept suggestions from the data uncritically. While it is true (as noted by Aston 1997a; Zanettin 2001; Bernardini 2000a) that students sometimes find out that a concordance instance represents “exactly what they wanted to say”, even this is the result of a critical selection, an interpretative choice, not a model to reproduce (I shall come back to these issue at greater length in Chapter 6). For these reasons, it seems to me that using a corpus of British English or of another national or international variety can simply be viewed as a choice depending on what is largely dependent on the purpose of the teaching/learning activities we propose and carry out. As with the selection of texts which are chosen to illustrate usage or present a specific language variety or topic, so, in my view, with corpora. While the activities we do with texts are different from those we do with corpora, different corpora, like different texts, can create different learning occasions and this, I think, should not be overlooked in the use of corpora in teaching and learning.

Chapter 1. Introduction

. Why ESP settings? The focus of this book is on corpora in ESP settings. A first reason for this choice is that corpus work in ESP appears to match teachers’ and learners’ requirements particularly well. Corpus analysis highlights recurrent features of language. The possibility of having instruments to describe the “humdrum and routine” (Sinclair 1991: 4) aspects of ESP language is a key teaching issue in ESP classes (see Robinson 1991: 1), where the teacher is often split between the need to be both an expert in the (foreign) language and an expert in the specialized discipline. Corpora of specialized texts seem a very useful instrument in isolating and providing indications about key lexical, grammatical or textual issues to deal with in ESP classes. Creating corpora from such specialized texts is relatively easy for any computer-literate teacher and can be inexpensive. Once the type(s) of texts which may be targeted in the ESP class activity have been selected (medical encyclopedia entries, science articles, business letters, etc.), one can put together several of these either by scanning or downloading the texts from CD-Roms or the Internet. Analysing such “pools” of texts with concordancing software may suggest relevant lexico-grammatical or textual items to deal with in the ESP class and the way they are used in the texts (see e.g. Flowerdew 1993a). A second reason for focussing on ESP has to do with the concept of ESP that is assumed in this book. Traditionally, ESP has been defined as the study of the English language in specialized contexts and fields of knowledge, such as medicine, engineering, business and the like (Dudley-Evand & St. John 1998). Given the number of LSP courses in specialized disciplines, the concept of LSP has become more and more standardized over the years, becoming restricted to settings involving (would-be) professionals who need to learn a foreign language to deal with matters relevant to their (future) job. While such settings are quite common, limiting the ESP label to cover them only is probably restrictive. Here, the ESP concept is intended in a broader sense. The first aspect considered regards a wider perspective on the types of settings involved. Fanning (1993) observes that together with “standard” ESP settings of the type mentioned above, there is an equally increasing number of “non standard” LSP settings which likewise require ad hoc LSP programs. What he has in mind, in particular, are those courses preparing “foreign language experts” to deal, at tertiary levels, with those activities which will become more and more necessary in the light of increasing European political and economic integration. Examples of this may include oral or written translation or cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication more generally. Fanning (1993) suggests that

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

there may be a necessity to “broaden the LSP umbrella” to include both traditional and non traditional LSP students who may need to be involved in LSP programs to meet vocational requirements. In this book, ESP settings are intended in this broader sense suggested by Fanning (1993). A second aspect of this broader definition regards ESP as a research approach to teaching and learning. Given the variety of registers that are used (e.g. conversation, narrative, academic), the text- and discourse-types involved (research articles, lectures, letters, e-mail messages, etc.) and the communicative situations where verbal interactions take place (conversations between doctors and patients, written exchanges between customers and companies, etc.), it appears difficult to distinguish between issues which are related to ESP and issues which are related to EGP (Widdowson 1983: 5–13). Both EGP and ESP are concerned with a variety of registers and sub-languages and speakers of General English do speak for a variety of specific purposes every day. What distinguishes the two is probably that ESP focuses on a smaller number of varieties, text-types and situations, often one at a time. In this sense, then, a distinguishing feature of ESP as compared to EGP is a difference in their approach towards the study of language. Even in EGP teaching/learning, there are many text-based activities such as writing letters, reading newspaper business articles or cook-book recipes, or situation-based activities such as asking for directions or listening to the news which involve a certain degree of “specialized knowledge” of lexico-grammatical and textual structures, either on the part of the teacher or of the students. The work with corpora that I discuss here may also be suitable for such “semi-ESP” learning tasks.

. The corpora in this book The corpora I have used in this book are specialized corpora. They are not, however, only specialized insofar as they represent specialized text-types and topics, but also because they were created for a specific teaching and/or learning interest. In the following two sections I provide a quick definition of what is meant here by “specialized corpora” and I describe the corpora I have used in greater detail. .. Small corpora and specialized corpora I have used corpora which are traditionally labelled as “small corpora” (Ma 1993a) to distinguish them from “large corpora”, such as the Bank of En-

Chapter 1. Introduction

glish3 or the British National Corpus (BNC).4 In the late-eighties (Johns 1986; Stevens 1988) when “small corpora” and “small corpora concordancing” were introduced in discussions about corpora and teaching and learning, neither the BNC nor the Cobuild, nor samplers of them were publicly available and teachers and researchers basically “made up” their own corpora according to what they felt might be their teaching and/or learning requirements and interests. Mainly for practical and economic reasons, these corpora were generally of a “small” size, between 50,000 and 100,000 words, though depending on their content and pedagogic purposes, they could be much smaller (e.g. the philosophy corpus cited in Mparutsa et al. 1991 which included 6,854 words) or much larger (e.g. the Byte corpus cited in Johns 1991a, which included more than a million words). Technological developments also deeply affected the idea of “large” and “small” size, as far as corpora are concerned. To cite an obvious and well-known example, the first two “large” corpora developed for language research in the sixties-seventies, the Lob and the Brown, were both of a million words, that is smaller than the “small” corpus used by Johns (1991a) thirty years later. It appears clear that both because corpus size depends on the contents and research purposes of the corpus and because of the rapidly changing technological availability of tools and materials, the “small” and “large” categories are very fuzzy ones and probably even misleading nowadays. A more convincing distinction has been introduced more recently in the teaching-and-corpora debate (Tribble 1997; Gledhill 2000): that between “specialized” and “general” corpora. “Specialized” corpora are corpora designed for the purpose of creating a sample of specialized language either by collecting texts of similar content (e.g. science, medicine, business, philosophy) or of similar text-type or genre (e.g. research papers, letters, book chapters) or both (e.g. medical research articles or science lectures), or even texts from other types of specialized categories, such as newspaper language or academic language. “General” corpora are normally corpora designed with the aim of representing a “whole” language (e.g. English) or a geographical variety (e.g. British English). The Cobuild corpus and the BNC are both general corpora in this respect, though the first represents both the American and British varieties and the second just the British one. Even the distinction between specialized and general corpora, however, should be taken with a degree of caution. First, it does not seem to cover all types of corpora; it is very debatable, for instance, whether historical corpora, representing diachronic varieties, fall into the general or specialized category. Second, “specialization” of either contents, text-types and purposes may vary

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

a great deal inside the “specialized corpora” category. I shall discuss the characteristics of these corpora at greater length in Chapter 3 as well as some limits of the label. For the purposes of introducing the corpora I have used in this book, though, let me consider just one constraint which may affect specialized corpora, i.e. public availability. As it became clear that specialized corpora were probably more powerful in describing the characteristics of specialized language than general corpora (see e.g. Ghadessy et al. 2001), research projects were born with the aim of compiling corpora of specialized language which could be made publicly available to the research community (The Micase, a corpus of spoken academic English is one such corpus5 ). Because their purpose is to meet the interests of the research community, these corpora attempt to capture a rather wide range of research, teaching and maybe learning purposes and even though they are “specialized” in the types of texts, and contents they represent, they are created for a quite varied set of interests. The corpora I rely on for the issues discussed and the activities described in this book are, mostly, “home-made” corpora created ad hoc for some particular teaching or learning purpose. In this respect, they share a feature which was common to those “small corpora” described by Ma (1993a), rather than to specialized corpora like the Micase, and their purpose and focus are very different in this respect. .. Description of the corpora used here Most of the corpora used here to exemplify learners’ corpus work contain specialised written texts, prevalently research articles, which can easily be downloaded from on-line scientific journals. Two corpora collect scripted speeches taken form Web sites. Text collection and selection was based on some simple criteria. First, multiple instances of texts by the same author or group of authors were avoided. Second, multiple instances of texts from the same journal or the same Web-site were avoided and each corpus contains the greatest possible variety of sources, considered the purpose of the collection. Third, in order to (very roughly) represent the international community contribution to scientific writing, the corpora discussed here contain texts written by (presumably) native speakers of English (selected on the basis of their names and affiliations) with a proportion (of about 20%) of texts by (presumably) non-native speakers. The latter were selected from different geographical provenances to avoid emphasis on a single one. The corpora are divided into two groups: medical corpora and economicpolitical corpora. Corpora in the medical set were compiled by either the

Chapter 1. Introduction

teachers or the students (generally a group of students). Six corpora were created inside a teaching/learning project dealing with medical translation. They include research papers on topics such as Aids, hepatitis C, breast cancer, colon cancer, child epilepsy and diabetic rethinopathy. The number of papers in each corpus varies from 10 to 30 and the number of words from 40,000 to 70,000. The number of papers and words included may appear very small. There are two reasons for this. First, this project was started at the beginning of the nineties and the first corpora were collected when material available on CDRom or the Internet was much less than it is today. The hepatitis C corpus was entirely scanned form paper and manually corrected. Second, the corpora are sometimes highly specialized. For instance the hepatitis C corpus, including 12 papers and 40,000 words, basically gathered in all the main research articles published in the field of hepatitis C in 1995, the year the corpus was compiled. With the exclusion of the texts included in the AIDS corpus (which address a more general public including patients and their families), all articles in the medical corpora were taken from international academic journals6 and collect texts published in the 5–6 years preceding the moment when the corpus was compiled. The articles collected in the corpora discussed here were published in the period 1985–1996. Such small corpora obviously provide only partial results as far as the actual description of the specialised language is concerned so in order to check, compare and possibly generalize the findings derived from the corpora described above, two more sets of data were used. First, a corpus of medical research articles about gastric cancer, created for the task of producing a specialized glossary, including 66 texts and 146,000 words. Second, a combination of corpora of medical research papers including most of the above: this combined medical corpus includes 100 texts and about 250,000 words.7 As mentioned above, the second group of corpora includes collections of texts in the economic-political field, more specifically in the field of the European Union. These corpora too were created inside teaching/learning projects aimed at helping students to familiarize themselves with issues and topics related to the European Community. There are four corpora in this group. Two of them collect texts about the European Monetary Union: the first is a corpus of speeches given by directors of National Central Banks (40 texts and 124,000 words) which were downloaded from Web sites such as that of the European Union or those of European Central Banks; the second is a corpus of academic research papers taken from economics journals (15 texts and 88,000 words).8 The other two collect texts about marketing and business management. The first is, again, a corpus of speeches taken from the Internet9 (50 texts and

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

Table 1. Medical Corpora Content Aids texts Breast cancer research papers Child epilepsy research papers Colon cancer research papers Diabetic rethinopathy research papers Gastric cancer research papers Hepatitis C research papers Combined corpus (excluding Aids and Gastric cancer)

No. of texts included

No. of words

10 18 25 30 15 66 12

58,000 40,000 70,000 65,000 37,000 146,000 41,000

100

250,000

Table 2. Economic-political Corpora Content

No. of texts included

No. of words

Speeches about European Monetary Union Research papers about European Monetary Union Speeches on marketing and business management Research papers on marketing and business management

40 15 50 70

124,000 88,000 220,000 550,000

220,000 words); the second collects research articles from 5 major academic marketing journals10 and contains 70 texts (550,000 words). In this case too the corpora of speeches and the corpora of research articles are combinable to make up larger corpora of speeches and research articles. Tables 1 and 2 above illustrate the two sets of corpora. As they were compiled inside teaching/learning, rather than research projects, technical aspects such as tagging and encoding were felt to be expensive in terms of time and effort and the texts are plain text format. As well as the corpora described above, a variety of publicly available reference corpora were used to check and compare students’ and teachers’ findings. In particular: –

–

the Microconcord corpus A, a collection of 1,000,000 words of newspaper articles divided into 5 sections (business, arts, home news, foreign news, sport news; see Murison-Bowie 1993b); the Microconcord corpus B, a collection of 1,000,000 words of science texts in different disciplines, including medicine and social sciences (see Murison-Bowie 1993c);

Chapter 1. Introduction

– –

The BNC sampler, 2,000,000 words of general British English, one million written texts and one million oral texts (see http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk); The BNC World Edition, 100 million words of general British English (see Aston & Burnard 1998 and http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk).

. A word about concordances and concordancing tools Concordancing tools are the key instruments for analyzing corpora. Although this concept is probably well-known to many readers of this book, for the sake of those who may be approaching concordances for the first time, it may be useful to provide a quick definition of what a concordance is. A concordance is a list of occurrences (all or a selected number) of a word or a phrase in a corpus. The concordancer generally lays these occurrences out on the page (or on the computer screen) by the search word or phrase in the middle and 40-50 characters of context on both sides of it. This layout is called KWIC (key word in context). In the KWIC format, a concordance highlights recurrent combinations of the key word (the search word) in the middle with words or expressions around it. Given its layout, a concordance is generally “read” or analysed starting from the search word in the middle of the lines. The following is an extract of the concordance of the word “respect” in the European Monetary Union speeches corpus. By scrolling quickly through the various instances of “respect” 1 ppeals to the consumers to be vigilant in 2 gh. Further incentives need to be made in 3 to the private sector, must be analysed in 4 ntal economic imbalances, particularly in 5 ntal economic imbalances, particularly in 6 possible conditions. Fiscal policies must 7 central banks. Furthermore, as a mark of 8 rity and personal safety. Europe is in one 9 s that will be of crucial importance in that 10 issues are worth being addressed in that 11 owth and the expected differences in that 12 loyment and sound public finance. In that 13 The euro has a very positive record in that 14 , crises will still occur in the future. In that 15 e introduction of a single currency. In this 16 e introduction of a single currency. In this 17 re conducted at the national level. In this 18 ark, the euro’s prospects are good in this 19 of trade. An open-minded attitude in this 20 is also in the hands of the markets. In this 21 large economic regions are examined with 22 g excessively cautious and reserved with 23 anks of the Eurosystem on the ECB with 24 uch a variety could also be observed with

respect respect respect respect respect respect respect, respect respect respect: respect respect, respect. respect, respect, respect, respect, respect. respect respect, respect respect respect respect

of possible price increases as a r of the demand for and the takingof their implications for future pric of the personal savings ratio, whi of the personal savings ratio, whi the letter and the spirit of the Sta the European Union held a day o a dynamic society and we know t - and not any one-off measures. _ As far as the choice of an exc between the United States and E Denmark is a model for us in Ger Despite the recent stronger upsi I would like to focus on the roles a three stage process was envis a three stage process was envis and without prejudice to their sov And last but not least, the euro has the advantage of consolidatin I would encourage the European to their different financing structu to economic growth. On the contr to the foreign reserve assets that to existing Member States prior t

Concordance 1. “Respect” in the European Monetary Union speeches corpus (124,000 words), left sorted (extract)

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

in the middle of the lines, some recurrent patterns such as “in respect of ” (ll. 1– 5), “in that/this respect” (ll. 9–20), “with respect to” (ll. 21–24), etc. are shown clearly in Concordance 1. Any concordancing software produces more or less the type of output that we have seen above as well as lists of words to make statistical calculations (e.g. which words are most frequent in a corpus). The software I have used for this book and with my students is Wordsmith Tools (Scott 1998), probably the most widely used one at the moment. It includes: – – –

a concordancer with the possibility of editing and classifying the list of instances, a wordlist to calculate the frequency of the words in a corpus, a keyword list to compare lists from different corpora, sub-corpora or texts and calculate those words which are significantly more or less frequent in one set.

Independently of the package one decides to use (there are others available on the market, such as MonoConc Pro, Barlow 2000, and more are under development), concordancers and wordlisters offer the analyst the possibility of manipulating texts in various ways and highlighting different types of language patterns. Barlow (2004) provides some useful insights into how to generate and interpret concordances and lists of words, such as frequency lists and lists of collocates.

. Which learners? In this book, I illustrate the work of learners or groups of learners from essentially two Italian university institutions, a degree course training students to become translators and/or interpreters and a degree course in foreign languages, training students to work with and for the European Community and inside the European Market. Both teaching situations and groups of students can be defined as “non-standard” ESP situations/students in the terms of Fanning (1993; see 1.3 above). All students were intermediate to advanced students of English. These students used the concordancer initially to look at the meanings and usage of those specialized words they could not find adequately described in dictionaries and then used it more extensively to check issues related to the specialised language as an aid to translating and/or reading or writing specialized texts. While obviously not all the students achieved the same degree of

Chapter 1. Introduction

expertise and autonomy in the use of the tool, most started using it in their language activities, a fact that was shown both by a sudden need to equip selfaccess computer rooms with concordancing tools and by a number of requests from students for help in equipping their computers at home. While the students I worked with are advanced language undergraduates and the work shown in this book is a result of interaction with them, it seems to me that the methods and issues proposed here can be generalized to other types of ESP students, such as the more traditional medical or business students as well as students in other less standard (for example Beeching 1997) or more standard ESP settings (such as those described by Dudley-Evans & St. John 1998: 34–41; Damascelli 2004 for instance has experimented an approach similar to the one described here in a course of English for business management). While working with specialized corpora would seem to be a rather flexible activity in an ESP setting, and in many cases students decided to create their own corpora to fit their own specific learning tasks, it is still not clear whether the students’ age (i.e. their general maturity) or language proficiency should instead be taken into account when working autonomously with corpora (but see St. John 2001). While most studies in corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning have involved students at the university level (see Johns & King 1991; Aston 2001b among others), to the best of my knowledge, there is very little material involving secondary school students, and what there is is mostly in the form of individual unpublished experiments, and just one involving younger children (Thompson & Sealey 2004; Thompson, Sealey, & Scott 2004; Sealey & Thompson 2004). One interesting question which has only just begun to be tackled is whether part of the work proposed here may be applicable to younger students in the context of primary and secondary schools.

. How the book is organized This book looks at corpus work from the learners’ point of view. It seems to me that by adopting this approach I may provide suggestions as to how to merge issues derived from corpus linguistics with issues in language pedagogy. My argument is developed in seven steps, corresponding to the chapters in the book. In Chapter 2, which follows this introduction, I focus on the debate that developed through the 90s in and around corpus use for language teaching and learning. I highlight arguments for and against corpus approaches to language descriptions and materials’ design. It seems to me, however, that both

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arguments tend to overlook the power of corpus work in the hands of teachers and learners. I suggest that Johns’ Data-Driven-Learning approach (1991a, 1991b, 1994) is the first approach that looks at learners as corpus users. DataDriven-Learning offered very interesting and fruitful insights. In particular it highlighted that corpus work provides teachers and learners with material which puts them “on the same ground” and facilitates a search-and-discovery approach to language teaching and learning. By looking at the concordance output, teachers and learners (or learners alone, in self-access settings) can derive their own interpretations of how the language works and discuss the forms which are considered relevant for their own teaching/learning purposes. The Data-Driven-Learning, though, opened up a series of questions about the risks and drawbacks of putting teachers and learners in front of concordance materials, suggesting: a. that they may not find corpus work relevant to their activity, b. that they may get overwhelmed by the burden and the quantity of material that corpora and concordances bring to light and c. that they need to be equipped with appropriate theoretical and methodological tools. In subsequent chapters, I attempt to tackle these issues. In Chapter 3, I introduce the theoretical perspective entailed in corpus linguistics. Corpus work highlights patterns which are recurrent in language performance and which are of an “idiomatic” rather than generative nature. It shows that words tend to combine not only on the basis of syntactic-semantic rules, but also follow constraints which seem to be “stipulated” within the speech or the discourse community which produces the language. Words tend to associate in chunks which are conventionally used to express meanings. Such chunks indicate lexico-syntactic and textual patterns that are typically used in texts (or text-types) and that can also be varied to form new creative combinations. Teachers and learners working with corpora need to be made familiar with these theoretical issues as this makes it clear to them what “they can see” in concordance analysis. In Chapter 4, I introduce the problem of the relevance of corpus work to language learning and I suggest that ESP may be considered a particularly suitable area for corpus-based teaching and learning. Following Hunston (2002: 198), I suggest that in ESP “what” is taught (as compared to “how” it is taught) is a very crucial problem for language teachers who are often not experts in the discipline in question and need to find a “linguistic path” to gain access to both language conventions and concepts that are entailed in the specialized discipline and construct its own meanings. I suggest that corpus work provides clues that can be put together by learners (and teachers) per-

Chapter 1. Introduction

forming it and that this enables them to infiltrate the discourse community’s communicative activity. Chapter 5 deals with the issue of guiding the learners to perform corpus work and suggests some tasks which may help them to access what “can be seen” in the data. The main problems dealt with here focus on the need to look at concordance data as “particular” types of data. First, they provide samples rather than examples of language use and as such they have to be analysed and interpreted. Second, concordance data highlight recurrent lexical, semantic or pragmatic features involving the search word and such recurrent patterns need an appropriate methodology to be “read”. Third, concordance data need to be interpreted in relation to the corpus they come from and such a relationship has to be made clear to corpus users. In Chapter 6 I focus on actual learners’ work. I illustrate a series of experiences of ESP students working with specialized and non-specialised corpora to solve problems related to their own language learning. I discuss such experiences in the attempt to show what the learners actually learnt from corpus work and the process they went through. While these experiences provide suggestions for language teaching, they are not presented in the form of structured task sheets. My aim here is to focus on the learners’ process in corpus work. However, I suggest potentially interesting problems that may be dealt with by corpus work with learners. Some of these concern grasping technical issues and concepts entailed in specialized texts, comparing words and concepts in the foreign and the native learners’ respective languages, comparing the same word, concept or syntactic pattern in specialized and general corpora, comparing language patterns in concordance data and as illustrated by the teacher or the reference material. More complex tasks, such as translating, editing and writing technical texts are described at the end of this chapter. In the last chapter, I suggest that some of the questions raised by Johns’ Data-Driven-Learning approach as well as questions posed in language teaching regarding corpus use can be dealt with by looking at the actual work of learners. In particular, using corpora with language learners shows that while corpus analysis poses some interesting new problems and issues for language teaching and learning, such as a new view of language structuring and the fact that language structures can be a matter of interpretation and discussion, “old” pedagogic problems are equally relevant in looking at the integration of corpus work in language pedagogy. Two such problems are the achievement of learners’ autonomy and the choice of materials to be proposed to the students. I conclude the last chapter by suggesting that further research should look more

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

closely into some of these old problems and I indicate some which seem to emerge more clearly from ESP learners’ corpus work.

Notes . To quote just a few examples, studies on language teaching include Wichmann et al. (1997), Burnard and McEnery (2000), Tribble and Barlow (2001), Kettemann and Marko (2002), Conrad (2003), Sinclair (2004), Aston et al. (2004); work on learners’ language is discussed in, e.g., Granger (1998) and problems in translation teaching and training are dealt with in Bernardini and Zanettin (2000), Bowker and Pearson (2002), Laviosa (2002), Zanettin et al. (2003), Olohan (2004). . A key to the main abbreviations and acronyms used here is provided immediately preceding this introduction. . http://titania.bham.ac.uk . http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk . http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/micase.htm . Such journals include, for instance: The New England Journal of Medicine, Hepatology, The British Medical Journal, Journal of Children Epilepsy, Epilepsy Research, Epilepsia, Journal of Diabetic Rethinopathy, Breast Cancer Research and Treatment. . The combined corpus excludes two of the corpora mentioned here: the gastric cancer corpus as it is almost four times the size of the others and is disproportionate in this respect, and the Aids corpus as, unlike the other corpora, the texts it contains seem to be addressed to a more general laymen public including, for example, patients and families rather than medical experts only. . These include: Journal of International Money and Finance, Open Economies Review, European Journal of Laws and Economics. . These speeches were downloaded from websites such as that of the US Federal Reserve Board, the US Trade Commission, The Chartered Institute of Marketing, and those of European institutions such as the European Commission for Consumer Protection. . The journals are: Strategic Management Journal, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of World Business, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Academy of Management Journal. All titles were suggested by “expert” colleagues in the marketing field.

Chapter 2

Corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning A background

. Language corpora in language pedagogy: The 90s debate .. Critical viewpoints Corpus linguistics as a method of text analysis based on electronic tools can be considered to have started in the 60s–70s with the compilation of the Brown and the LOB corpora, two collections of 1 million words and 500 sample-texts each, of American and British English respectively (see Francis & Kucera 1979; Johannson et al. 1978). While these corpora provided material for pioneering work in corpus linguistics (Francis 1992: 17) and in many ways constituted the basis of modern corpus linguistics, at the time when they were created, they raised more doubts than interest in the linguistic community whose dominant paradigm, Chomsky’s paradigm, was of a rationalistic nature and tended to consider corpus empiricism as “skewed”. Chomsky distinguished between competence and performance, or internalized and externalized language, and suggested that the former is the prior object of linguistic inquiry. Chomsky developed a theory which attempted to outline plausible cognitive models accounting for internalized language. According to Chomsky, performance, or externalized language, is affected by factors which may inhibit competence and in this sense it does not provide an adequate mirror of it. Corpora are by their very nature collections of language performance and as such they were considered to impede rather than help the description of cognitive, rationalistic models of language performance (Mc Enery & Wilson 1996: 4–8). At the beginning of the 90s, the situation is very different and corpus linguistics is very much in the ascendancy. An initial breakthrough was the Cobuild project led by John Sinclair (see Sinclair 1987). This project was of an applied nature as its purpose was to produce “more realistic” descriptions of

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

English for teaching purposes, and the materials it produced were intended for the language classroom. Although it was aimed at improving English language teaching, however, the early impact of the Cobuild project seemed to regard language theory and description more directly than language pedagogy. It brought to the attention of the scientific community two important facts: 1. technology now permits us to collect and store a corpus large enough to provide data, and thereby to devise more confident descriptions of English; 2. corpus-derived data clearly reveal the limits of the generativist-Chomskian paradigm and of language descriptions based solely on the intuition of the analysts. While the Cobuild project revived the discussion about the limits of the generativist paradigm, which basically excluded the possibility of analysing language performance “scientifically”, within language pedagogy the possibly over-enthusiastic terms in which the Cobuild project was presented and the materials launched raised a series of doubts. The Cobuild catch-phrase, “helping students with real English” seemed to imply an equivalence between: a) a corpus and real language b) corpus-based descriptions and “more realistic” students’ language production. The reductionism of such potential equivalences greatly alarmed a number of applied linguists and the debate which developed through the 90s raised a number of objections (Widdowson 1991, 1998a; Owen 1993, 1996 and see Seidlhofer 2003: Section 2) which can be summarised under three main points. First, a corpus, however large, is still only a sample of language production and though it may provide a fairly accurate representation of it, a corpus is not the “real language”. One clear limit of both the two largest existing corpora, the Cobuild and the BNC, is that spoken language is represented only in a very small percentage. Moreover, as Cook (1998: 58) observes, it is very difficult to convey the importance and salience of texts to include in a corpus, and a private conversation with only a few participants risks being counted equally with a newspaper read by millions. Second, exposing students to actual instances of language does not mean that they learn “real language”, nor indeed that they grasp its features better. Looking at his own work about using a corpus of spoken English, the CANCODE corpus (see http://www.cambridge.org/elt/corpus/cancode. htm) in the teaching of spoken language (McCarthy & Carter 1995; Carter & McCarthy

Chapter 2. Corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning

1995), Carter (1998) observes that corpus materials often do not illustrate features of the spoken language as clearly as invented examples do and while corpus data provide the analyst with important information of a descriptive nature, a problem is posed about how and how far such information should be filtered and interpreted for teaching purposes. Third, “language reality” is a complex phenomenon and “reality” cannot be limited, in language pedagogy, to using texts that actually occurred somewhere and sometime in “real life”. In this respect, Widdowson (1978: 79–80) draws a distinction between genuine language and authentic language: by the former he means instances of actually produced language (e.g. extracts from newspapers/books, recorded conversations, etc.); by the latter he means language produced in a communicative context. Widdowson (1998a: 711) takes this distinction further and explains that it is the local, contextual value of language that makes it “real” for its users: For what makes the language a reality for its users is its local value: the specific contextual connection and the exclusive appeal to common and communal knowledge and attitudes. Without the local knowledge, one cannot locate the meaning. Real language, then, is local language in that it is always associated with specific contextual realities. It is designed to appeal to particular communities, and this will necessarily exclude people who do not belong. Reality does not travel with the text.

So, while it has generally been considered worthwhile in language teaching to expose students to genuine instances of language, providing examples of “use” rather than “usage” (in the terms of Widdowson 1978), language pedagogy is also concerned with ways in which learners can “authenticate” the foreign language in their local context. As Widdowson (1998a) notes, simply “exposing” students to corpus-based descriptions, or indeed to “genuine” materials from corpora, does not imply anything about the learners’ possibility of “authenticating” the language they are exposed to. These three objections are important since they raise issues concerning the relationship between corpora and learners as potential beneficiaries of corpusderived information, a relationship which I shall deal with extensively in this book. While on the one hand the possibility of using corpora for or in the language classroom seems a powerful potential enrichment, on the other hand, precisely in what terms corpora are affecting teaching and learning is still a matter of inquiry. In the following sections, I shall deal with the contribution of corpus analysis to language pedagogy and I shall focus on some significant pioneering studies on corpora and teaching and learning.

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

.. The contribution of corpus analysis to language pedagogy While the 90s’ debate had the importance of highlighting the risks of overenthusiastic applications of corpus linguistics and indeed provided food for thought for other types of applications, it had the limit of concentrating only on the risks and the drawbacks, without considering with sufficient attention those aspects of corpus linguistics which were of potential interest for language pedagogy. As Kennedy notes, such potential interest cannot be ignored: corpus linguistics has held potential relevance for the teaching of languages because responsible language teaching involves selecting what it is worth giving attention to. Since pedagogy attempts to reduce the time that would be necessary to learn a language through exposure alone, potential usefulness and likelihood of occurrence have been seen as relevant for deciding what to teach or learn (1992: 335).

Kennedy notes that the generativist-Chomskian paradigm has constituted a 30year interruption rather than “the tradition” in language teaching and that we should not forget that modern computerised corpus linguistics can be seen as a development of those early studies based on quantitative data obtained through manual counting. He thus suggests looking back at those studies in order to have a more comprehensive idea of what the implications of corpus linguistics for language teaching may be. The necessity of deploying quantitative data in language pedagogy emerged long before the Cobuild project, going back at least to the 1920s (Thorndike 1921, quoted in Kennedy 1992), when researchers carried out manual counting and classification of “corpora” of texts to get hints about distribution of words and forms in studies regarding vocabulary, syntax, semantics and the development of children’s language. Although he focuses essentially on those contributions of corpus analysis which affect language description, the merit of Kennedy (1992) is, in my view, that he shows that language description for language pedagogy is intimately interrelated with other methodological factors: if the task of curriculum designers and language teachers is to bring together motivating learning tasks or situations (including interesting discourse or text) which provide repeated exposure to salient, useful linguistic and pragmatic elements of the language, corpus linguistics should be able to provide information on frequency of use. (Kennedy 1992: 365)

What remains rather a fuzzy matter, is, however, exactly in what sense (or senses) information on frequency of use should influence the pedagogy of language. The Cobuild project investigated the use of quantitative data to pro-

Chapter 2. Corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning

duce what were basically reference materials and textbooks. They used corpus analysis to improve old and produce new descriptions of the English language which were then included in two main publications, a dictionary (Sinclair et al. 1987, 1990a) and a grammar (Sinclair et al. 1990b). The fact that the Cobuild research group took into consideration corpus-derived information about language use along with the researchers’ intuition (which constituted, to say the least, a filter in the analysis of the data) resulted in more adequate descriptions of words and structures (see Krishnamurthy 2002). Although such materials affected the amount and type of knowledge which became available to the language classroom, we do not know whether they also affected the way teachers and students interact with such new information. Sinclair (1990b: xi) suggests that this might be the case. In introducing the types of examples that are used in the Cobuild reference material he states that: There is no justification for inventing examples. To illustrate a simple subjectverb clause, something like “Birds sing” is not good enough. With the Cobuild database it is not difficult to find examples even of a fairly rare event like this structure. “Trains stopped” is a genuine example, and so is “Frey agreed”. Even in a two-word structure it can be seen that the real examples have a communicative value that the invented one lacks.

There may be a difference, then, in the communicative interaction of the students with corpus-based materials and traditional materials, a difference it would probably be worthwhile to investigate and know more about. So while, on the one hand, research on teachers and learners using corpusbased materials may tell us more about the impact of these materials on the classroom, on the other hand, there has been some resistance to introducing corpus work directly in schools and universities. Summarizing Kennedy (1992), Aston (2001a: 1) lists three reasons for such resistance: 1. poor communication between researchers using corpora and classroom teachers, who should not just be told “that curricula, reference works or teaching materials are based on corpus analysis”; 2. confusion over the distinction between “what is scientifically interesting and what is pedagogically useful”; 3. the predominant interest in communicative language teaching in facts which are not strictly speaking linguistic, so that “teachers tended to show more interest in the learner and the learning process than in what was being learned”.

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

To these, Aston (2001a: 3) adds a fourth, namely accessibility to corpora and computing resources, which, for various reasons, has not been encouraged on a widescale and organised basis. These problems will be dealt with throughout this book; for my purposes here, though, let me just note (following Aston 2001a) that the situation is somewhat changing owing both to a renewed interest in form-focused teaching1 and to a number of studies, which have now been produced, showing various aspects of computer-corpus applications to language teaching and learning. In the next two sections, I focus on some such studies, which seem to me particularly interesting from a teaching/learning point of view insofar as they were among the first published ones which were clearly focused (and based) on classroom or learners’ experiences. I distinguish between those which explored the use of corpora from the point of view of the language teacher and those which took the perspective of the learners as potential beneficiaries of corpus-based pedagogy and/or as corpus users.

. Corpus analysis as a tool for language teachers The importance of corpus-analysis for language teachers has been emphasized in several studies which provide general indications about what types of linguistic information corpora may supply teachers with (see e.g. Kennedy 1998: Ch. 5; Conrad 1999, 2003; Nation 2001a; Tribble 2001). It is necessary though to distinguish between studies which look at teaching applications of corpora from the linguist’s point of view (giving hints and suggestions about what corpora can do for language teaching) and studies which look at uses of corpora from the teacher’s point of view (starting from a teaching problem and looking at how this problem can be tackled with corpus tools). Here I focus on studies which take the latter perspective, that is studies mainly dealing with a teaching problem. I concentrate on two in particular, Flowerdew (1993a) and Partington (1998) as although they deal with the use of concordancing tools taking a teachers’ rather than a learners’ perspective, it seems to me that they get “nearer” to the learner in that they provide a way of looking into the problem of using corpora in interaction with the classroom. Following a pioneering publication by Tribble and Jones (1990) which suggested ways in which concordances could be used in the classroom for the design of activities and materials, several studies have looked at the use of corpora and the concordancer as a resource for teachers. Such works have traditionally been based on corpora created ad hoc by the teachers/researcher for

Chapter 2. Corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning

their own teaching or research purposes. Besides being suitable for the language classroom, such corpora are easy and cheap to collect and easy to manage (they require relatively little space on the computer hard disk and the data produced is not such as to prevent analysis by “non-researchers”). These studies suggest that corpus analysis can be of great help to the teacher in two main respects: 1. selecting items to be included in the course syllabus; 2. supporting the teachers in teaching those items which do not seem adequately dealt with in traditional teaching materials. .. Corpus analysis and syllabus design As Kennedy (1992) notes, one way in which corpus linguistics can contribute to language teaching is in the selection of those features which seem worth teaching in a given pedagogic context. Following suggestions by Sinclair and Renouf (1988), one of the first exploitations of corpus analysis was in syllabus design. The Cobuild Corpus was in fact used as a basis to work out items which were frequently used in general English and such information constituted guidelines for the production of an English coursebook (Willis & Willis 1989). While in the case of a course of general English, designing a syllabus may be a very complex operation and may involve a variety of considerations which cannot be limited only to corpus work (see McCarthy 2002), within ESP, corpora may be a practical and very interesting resource. For ESP courses, in fact, working out basic items to be dealt with is a key teaching problem and is closely related to single teaching environments. In the case of scientific English for instance there is a huge variety of teaching situations, and students’ needs vary accordingly. For instance, while reading books and articles in English is probably a major need for medical students in non-English speaking countries, medical students in England, the United States or Hong Kong are probably more concerned with oral materials such as lectures. A corpus of specialized texts can be used to rapidly generate a series of items which may characterize the specialized texts in question. These items may constitute a basis to select language features to be included in ESP syllabuses. Flowerdew (1993a) probably constitutes the most famous and systematic study in this respect (but see also Mparutsa et al. 1991; Ma 1993b). Flowerdew (1993a) suggests that lists of the most frequent words occurring in a specialized corpus together with their concordances can be used for selecting and grading items to be included in the ESP syllabus. The corpus he analyses is a collection of biology texts consisting of transcriptions of lectures that students attend during their biology course, plus the readings they are

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

Table 3. 20 top nouns in the Cobuild corpus and in a biology corpus (Flowerdew 1993a: 236) Cobuild corpus

Biology corpus

time, people, way, man, years, work, world, thing, day, children, life, men, fact, house, kind, year, place, home, sort, end

cell, cells, water, membrane, food, plant, root, molecules, plants, wall, energy, concentration, organism, cytoplasm, animal, stem, structure, body, part, animals

asked to deal with. Flowerdew shows that using data such as type/token ratio, lists of frequent words from specialised and general corpora and concordances of words which seem “interesting” by virtue of their frequency, prompts a series of considerations which can be taken into account in syllabus design. He suggests that the data allow both quantitative and qualitative considerations. On the quantitative side, they offer a means of identifying a total number of items which may possibly be included in the syllabus. Calculating word types and frequency in his 100,000 word corpus, Flowerdew isolates about 1000 items occurring more than 10 times in the corpus, which he considers a realistic basis of inquiry. Considerations of a qualitative nature, instead, include comparison of frequency lists and concordance analysis. Regarding the former, Flowerdew notes that comparing the most frequent nouns in specialized and general corpora provides interesting clues for syllabus design. Table 3 shows the 20 top nouns in a general corpus (the Cobuild Corpus) and in Flowerdew’s biology corpus (1993a: 236). It can be seen that the comparison is indicative of those nouns which seem characteristic of the specialist corpus and which may be worth including in the syllabus. A list of separate words, such as the one above, suggests possible lexical items to be included in a syllabus. Concordances of these words show how they are used in the corpus, which provides further information about the characteristics, specific to the specialised language that may be dealt with in the classroom. Concordances of very frequent words in a corpus may suggest typical ways in which these words are used and highlight their frequent collocations. This obviously does not regard only nouns. Grammatical items such as connectors may also be used in characteristic ways in specialized corpora and some frequent verbs may be indicative of typical syntactic structures. Flowerdew for instance notes that then rarely occurs at the beginning of the sentence, as is often taught, and that it is more frequently found between subject and verb (“the viruses then do the same”) or between auxiliary and main verb (“the liquid is then discharged”). Likewise, he notes that while many com-

Chapter 2. Corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning

mercially available coursebooks teach learners to express definitions by means of a formula such as “X is/can be defined as . . .”, the biology corpus shows only one instance of the lexical item “define”, and 417 instances of the lexical item “called” used in a defining function suggesting that a more frequent structure used in definitions may include the verb “call” rather than the verb “define” (Flowerdew 1993a: 240). This study by Flowerdew then shows that corpus and concordancing tools may assist the teacher in the design of a syllabus for particular teaching needs. What is interesting in this work, from the teacher’s point of view, is that any material collected ad hoc for a particular teaching situation can constitute a corpus which can be analysed to produce suitable lexical and grammatical items to help in the creation of a syllabus. While this meets a major requirement in many ESP courses such as that illustrated by Flowerdew (1993a), it may also be helpful in dealing with particular types of specialized or semi-specialized texts in general English classes. .. Supporting teachers’ explanations The possibility of highlighting uses such as those discussed above not only helps teachers in selecting contents for their courses but also provides more accurate explanations about particular structures or uses of words. In the teaching of English, concordance analysis has been found to be of great help in supporting the teacher in those areas which are traditionally considered “difficult to deal with” and where descriptions provided by grammars and/or dictionaries seem inadequate. Such is for instance the case with features of spoken English such as ellipsis or tails (Carter & Mc Carthy 1995) or with some discourse markers (Zorzi 2001) which have traditionally received little attention in pedagogic grammars. A wide-ranging study by Partington (1998) shows a number of types of “language teaching problems” which can be usefully dealt with in the classroom using instruments based on corpora and concordancing tools. He shows examples of semantic problems, such as synonymy or word translation equivalence, lexico-syntactic constructions (e.g. conditionals), textual features (cohesion in particular) and creative uses of language such as the use of metaphors and the manipulation of various kinds of pre-constructed phrases for rhetorical effect. For each of these “problematic” areas, Partington shows that concordances generated from a corpus of newspaper texts (5,000,000 words) can support teachers’ intuitions by integrating descriptions from dictionaries and grammars to provide more satisfactory explanations.

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As regards semantic problems, for instance, Partington observes that it is often difficult for foreign language students to deal with words whose meaning is similar but not completely the same. Such is the case with quasi-synonyms or quasi-translation equivalents. As he observes, many learners’ dictionaries describe “complete”, “absolute”, “pure” and “sheer” as equivalent in meaning, while these adjectives tend to be very selective in their collocations: e.g. whilst “complete” tends to occur with words such as “absence”, “change” or “destruction”, only “absolute” occurs with hyperbolic nouns, such as “chaos”, “genius” or “horror”; “sheer” is generally attributed to magnitude, force or persistence and “pure” has a religious-moral semantic content which the others do not share. As for quasi-translation equivalents, Partington examines the case of the English-Italian pair “correct” and “corretto/a” where the latter has to do with behaving according to some standard of ethics and does not simply mean “right”, whilst “correct” generally means “accurate”, “exact”. “If ”-constructions, also, have traditionally constituted a problem in the teaching of English. Looking at a concordance of “if ”, Partington (1998: 80–87) suggests that less than 40% of the occurrences in his material are accounted for by any of the traditional three conditional forms, the remaining showing other mixed conditional or non-conditional uses. Although the three-conditional model is a useful one for beginners, teachers may well wish to point out how much richer and more complex the actual usage is. As for text-cohesion, corpus-based analysis may provide hints to explain for instance how general nouns such as “people”, “thing”, “matter”, “move” are used or the anaphoric and cataphoric functions of general verbs such as “happen” and “occur”. Partington’s study is interesting for two main reasons. First of all, it explores a varied set of features of language use which can be useful for teachers for language teaching purposes, going beyond lexico-grammatical constructs to examine text cohesion and creative uses of language as well. Secondly, while some of Partington’s analyses involve classic language teaching problems and have scientific implications, and suggest possible areas where grammatical descriptions may be improved (e.g. conditionals), there are also examples which seem to be constructed to meet more “local” students’ needs. These include the issue of translation equivalence and false friends, or the issue of metaphors in specialized discourse. In the latter cases, Partington is obviously thinking of particular learners’ problems such as those related to the interaction between their own mother tongue and the foreign language (in this case Italian and English) and those related to a possible special interest (e.g. newspaper business language).

Chapter 2. Corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning

I have reported extensively on both Flowerdew’s and Partington’s studies because it seems to me that, at least at the time when they were published, they provided a step forward in corpus-based language pedagogy. Although basically descriptive studies, their focus is prevalently on features which constitute concrete EFL teaching problems. If we recall Kennedy’s (1992) list of reasons why a smooth marriage between corpus linguistics and language pedagogy has not yet been celebrated, one of them revolved around the confusion between what is scientifically interesting and what is pedagogically useful. By focusing on clear teaching problems, both Flowerdew (1993a) and Partington (1998) successfully provide practical suggestions on how corpus work is pedagogically useful in supporting EFL teaching.

. Corpus analysis as a tool for language learners While the studies above mainly highlight linguistic features which may be usefully dealt with using corpora and concordancing tools, here I focus on works whose primary focus is on analyzing the impact of corpus material on the language learners. A pioneering study in this respect was that of Johns (1991a, 1994) who first suggested that concordance data can be analysed by students and used as learning materials to induce regularities in language use. Other studies then developed the implications of this proposal. In this section I first summarize Johns’ approach, and then discuss some of its implications. .. The Data-Driven Learning approach Johns (1991a) suggests that concordances derived from electronic corpora can be used as a source of learning materials for language students. His main point is that students should have access to concordance materials in order to examine meanings and functions of words in their authentic contexts. In Johns’ view, by looking at data, students can infer the meanings and functions of words in the foreign language and achieve an awareness of the typical combinations in which they are used. This approach is called “Data-Driven Learning” (DDL) and is inspired by work inside the Cobuild project. As Johns (1994: 296) points out, both the Cobuild and DDL have the purpose “of contextualising and demythologizing the language and of making available to the learner information about authentic usage”. What distinguishes the two approaches, though, is the use they make of the linguistic data. While the Cobuild project suggests that corpus

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analysis helps researchers and material designers in producing more authentic descriptions of language usage which, in their turn, may improve teaching and reference materials, the DDL approach suggests that corpus work can be introduced in the classroom and language learners can examine concordance material to work out features of language use on their own. Johns’ assumption is that ‘research is too serious to be left to the researchers’ (1991b: 2) and that effective language learning is itself a form of linguistic research. Access to linguistic data may improve students’ analytical skills and help their inductive ability. Johns’ approach derives from a theory of CALL approaches which attempts to redefine the role of the computer in the classroom from that of a surrogate teacher or tutor to that of an informant (see also Johns 1983; Higgins & Johns 1984). Such approaches suggest that rather than making the machine more intelligent in answering learnergenerated questions, a pedagogy of the foreign language should be concerned with making the learner “more intelligent” in posing questions and interpreting responses. In this perspective the machine should be seen as a tool in the hands of the language learners, rather than a teaching guide. Johns (1994) experimented the use of concordances with students in classes of remedial grammar. He used small corpora of texts taken from scientific or technical magazines (e.g. New Scientist, Byte, Nature) and from newspapers (e.g. The Times or The Guardian) to generate concordances focusing on grammatical features which seemed problematic for the students, e.g. the meaning and function of “should”, or the usage of verbs followed by “that”-clauses vs. verbs followed by infinitive (e.g. “convince” and “persuade”, which have similar meanings and different constructions in this respect). He handed the data out to the students and asked them to analyse it. He noticed two major consequences of this work: firstly, by analysing concordances, students seemed to grasp the meanings and functions of the structures that were presented to them much better than when they were presented in the traditional fashion via lists of verbal patternings; secondly, when working together on the data, teachers and students often discovered linguistic features that escaped the teachers’ preliminary analysis, which suggested that concordance work seems to prompt students to take a more active role in working out grammatical features. Johns’ work was the first real attempt to look at corpus concordancing from the point of view of the learner, and his change of perspective is radical. Johns in fact did not focus on an analysis of concordance-based materials, looking at, say, the impact they might have in a teaching-learning environment (a topic which studies are still hesitant to engage). Instead he changed the perspective

Chapter 2. Corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning

completely, shifting the analytical focus from data-based materials (textbooks or reference books) to the “data” and the methodological process by which they get analysed and interpreted. According to this view, then, the “tool” in the hands of the language learners is not the (new, concordance-based) grammar volume, but the new software, the concordancer itself. This radical change of perspective opened up a new field of enquiry and raised new pedagogic questions: 1. if learners are to behave as data analysts, what should be the role of the teacher? 2. the work of language learners is similar to that of language researchers insofar as “effective language learning is itself a form of linguistic research” (Johns 1991b: 2). So, should we ask the learners to perform linguistic research exactly like researchers? 3. provided that learners adopt the appropriate instruments and methodology to actually be able to perform language research, are the results worth the effort? .. Question 1: Should the teacher guide the learners? Johns claims that a distinguishing feature between the Cobuild project and the DDL approach is that DDL “attempts to cut out the middleman as far as possible” (1994: 297) and gives the learners direct access to the data. In such an approach, the student becomes a researcher into the language, observing concordance data, forming hypotheses and then testing them out against the same or more data provided by the computer. Cutting out the middleman completely, however, poses a series of problems. First, the output of the computer in the form of a KWIC concordance with the search word in the middle of the sheet and some five-six words (or bits of words) to the left and right side of it is not a type of text whose reading and digesting can be taken for granted. Working with students, I have noted that when they approach concordances for the first time they need at least to be told what they should be looking at on the page or on the screen and what types of features they should pay attention to (e.g. repetition of identical or similar expressions accounting for particular usages). Second, the type of (linguistic) information a concordance gives to the student-analyst is not obvious. For instance, the word “bid”, a frequent word in newspaper business articles, is not easy to grasp for Italian students as it does not have a straightforward equivalent in Italian. While a concordance of the word “bid” from a corpus of newspaper business articles makes it clear that

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there are a variety of expressions (not a single one) which may correspond to “bid” in Italian, the data do not tell us what “bid” actually means. So, while students noted the recurrence of expressions such as “make a bid”, “mount a bid”, “a [amount of money] bid”, they did not understand, solely on the basis of the concordance, that this thing you can “make” or “mount” and which has a money value is in fact an offer and a dictionary seems necessary to provide this piece of information (see also Partington 2001: 64–5). Third, the concordancer may overwhelm students with too much data (Barnett 1993). While, as Flowerdew (1993a) suggests, a search for connectors as used in small specialized corpora may be interesting for ESP students, they are unlikely to work out the characteristic features of, for example, “then” or “so” on the basis of hundreds of examples if they are not supplied with adequate analytic tools. It seems, then, that to operate effectively and autonomously, students should be provided with some guidance. This is well recognized nowadays and Sinclair (2003) provides the first systematic attempt to guide “students, researchers and workers in the language industry” to read and interpret corpus data. A pedagogic implication emerging here, then, is not whether “the middlemen” (i.e. the teachers) should be cut out or not, but rather which type of “filter” they should exercise and in what way. While Johns’ proposal encourages students to analyse the data directly, he does not deal with the problem of: a. helping them identify appropriate types of language problems, b. helping them develop appropriate analytic methods (I return to this issue in Chapter 5). .. Question 2: Learners or researchers? Johns (1991b: 2) suggests that “effective language learning is itself a form of linguistic research” and proposes that learners behave “as researchers” in the attempt to find out solutions to their own language learning problems. However, while the analytic process involved in examining concordance data may be similar in the case of language researchers and of language students, there are some fundamental differences that have to be taken into account. First of all, language students are, by definition, non-native speakers of the language they are looking at, and not necessarily very advanced ones. While concordance data provide a lot of information about the interaction between the uses of words and their meanings, analysts should have at least a vague initial idea of the latter. In other words, as we saw, expressions such as “make/mount a bid” seem meaningless to students who do not know, at least, that a bid involves a money offer. In this respect, it seems likely that interaction based on information derived from dictionaries and information derived from concordance data is of

Chapter 2. Corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning

a different nature if we compare language researchers and language students: while the former works in the direction of improving e.g. dictionary or grammar organization and definitions, the latter is mainly engaged in combining the pieces of information derived from either the dictionary and the concordance data (and maybe other sources such as texts) to make sense out of them. Second, as Bernardini (2000a: 142) notes, the very notion of comparing learners to researchers has a limit: “it suggests that methods are subordinate to findings, or that a good research/learning procedure is to be assessed according to the results it yields.” In a learning environment, we are not concerned with the results of a linguistic analysis in exactly the same way as we are as linguistic researchers. Accuracy of results is a major focus in language research but not necessarily in language learning. In other words, we are not so much interested in the starting or end point of a learning experience, as we are in what happens in-between: the choices we make (or do not make), the strategies we adopt, the experience we gather, incidental learning, etc. Rather than looking at learners as researchers, Bernardini suggests that a more appropriate metaphor is probably that of the traveller: Learners doing corpus work should be allowed to [. . .] set off in a certain direction, and correct it as experience piles up; sometimes be tourists, some others explorers; indulge in detours, observe the landscape, or press on until they find something noteworthy; draw maps of the areas they explore, keep track of trodden and untrodden paths for future journeys: and back home, describe their experience to friends and families, show photographs and exchange impressions. (Bernardini 2000a: 143)

While the initial stimulus for starting corpus work may be one of many (e.g. curiosity about the meaning of an expression, an attempt to find a way to express a particular concept, etc.), the interest of the analysis itself should not be conceived in rigorous linguistic-research terms. Students may be attracted by all sorts of interesting features which may solve the contingent learning problem as well as any other, or which may pose a different problem and what is interesting for students and language researchers may well not coincide. In conclusion, while, as Johns (1991, 1994) suggests, learners can use corpora directly as materials for analysis in the same way as researchers do, this does not imply that learners’ analyses are carried out or should be carried out in exactly the same way. While the “power” of concordances in language research is that of describing interesting or previously unknown features of language use, the “power” of concordances from a pedagogic point of view is that of stimulating and enhancing the linguistic intuition of the learners. The former

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is related to the product of the analysis, the latter to the process. While neither excludes the other, and it is indeed possible that students’ analyses are also “scientifically interesting” from the point of view of language research, from a language learning perspective, we should primarily be concerned with what is achieved through the process, independently of the “scientific discovery”. .. Question 3: Is the result worth the effort? Posing the question here of whether the result is worth the effort may seem superfluous as it is probably clear from the paragraphs above that my answer is “yes”, and this book sets out explicitly to provide arguments to support it. There are however a couple of points that I think are worth introducing here. The first has to do with the role-relationships in the language classroom involving the teacher, the learners and the materials. As mentioned above, Johns (1994) suggests that one of the most noticeable features of working with corpora is that students often observe linguistic characteristics or issues which escaped teachers’ previous analyses. A number of reports dealing with concordance work by students (see e.g. Mparutsa et al. 1991; Jordan 1993; Robinson 1994) underline the challenge that giving the learners direct access to linguistic evidence poses to traditional interacting roles in grammar teaching/learning classes. While traditionally reference books and teachers are inevitably the sole repositories of linguistic-grammatical information, data-based observations give the students an instrument to contribute to the discussion about features of the grammar of language and its formal aspects. While such active contribution to classroom discussion has been advocated in language pedagogy since the late 70s and methods based on a view of language as communication have consistently underlined the fact that, rather than being considered recipients of teachers’ knowledge, students should participate actively through discussion activities and other interactive tasks, this did not seem to affect the teaching of grammar, which either remained more or less the same as before or was in serious danger of being swept away by “more efficient” “non-grammar” methods. Concordances are an interesting type of material: on the one hand, similarly to dictionaries and grammars, they produce output of a lexico-grammatical type, on the other, they provide data which are uninterpreted. Being uninterpreted, the data can be called into question. Questioning and interpreting concordance data involves discussion, by either groups of students or by teachers and students together and individual (teacher’s or students’) explanations can be challenged on the basis of others’ readings and understanding of the data.

Chapter 2. Corpus linguistics and language teaching and learning

My second point has to do with content, in particular the idea of grammar and formal structures that can be perceived and achieved through concordance analysis. As mentioned above, analysis of concordances largely implies observing repetition and recurrence of particular combinations of words and structures. This does not produce “rules” of a rationalist type (like traditional grammar rules), rather what is noted are “regularities” in the combinations of a word. This idea of “regularity” is connected to a more general perspective on language that Sinclair (1991: 110) calls the “idiom principle”. I shall discuss these ideas at greater length in the next chapter; here let me just anticipate that concordance analyses and the perspective on language they carry with them are interesting from a pedagogic point of view for two main reasons: first because they provide a less prescriptive idea of language form (thus potentially more debatable and adaptable), second because they provide an outlook on how language is conventionally used in particular corpora and/or types of texts. It seems to me that both aspects are traditionally lacking ones in language pedagogy. Providing access to concordances, then, may affect the grammar class profoundly, both in terms of role relationships and of student participation in the discussion of formal elements of language and in terms of what is learnt and taught. These seem to me good reasons why working on concordances in the classroom is worth the effort.

. Conclusion The revival of corpus linguistics in the 80s, which was due principally to the Cobuild project, raised a series of problems and issues involving language research as well as language teaching. Although the Cobuild project mainly produced teaching materials, interestingly enough studies on corpora and language teaching did not explore the impact of such new teaching materials on language learners nor did it look into the benefits (or drawbacks) that such newly organized grammatical information might have in a teaching/learning environment. The debate concentrated instead on the potential assumptions of the Cobuild project and (sensibly) on the risks of confusing scientifically interesting corpus-based findings with pedagogically interesting corpus-based methodologies. So, investigations into corpora and language teaching mainly took the form of small-scale experiments where concordance data (generally derived from “hand-made” small corpora) were used to tackle local teaching/learning problems. These experiments introduced corpus investigation methodology in the classroom and suggested that corpus work may be in-

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teresting to look at in a learners’ perspective. In particular, they showed that corpus work by teachers and learners allowed discussion and possible redefinition of teachers’ and learners’ roles in the classroom as well as the question of enhancing learners’ autonomy. While large–scale experiments with corpora and language learning do not seem to have been organized yet (possibly with the exception of corpus-based studies of learners’ language, Granger 1998), a series of interesting implications follow from these small-scale, local ones. In what follows I deal with some of these implications regarding: a. the theoretical premises that need to be made more explicit in a teaching/learning environment (Chapter 3), b. ESP and corpus material (Chapter 4), c. the problem of guiding learners to corpus work (Chapter 5).

Note . See Spada (1997) and also Carter (1993). Bondi (1999a) discusses this renewed interest in form-focused teaching and shows ways in which corpus work may provide a useful resource for (training) teachers to enhance their own language awareness in various respects.

Chapter 3

Theoretical premises for teachers and learners

. Introduction In the previous Chapter I have argued that giving learners direct access to corpus data has a series of pedagogic implications. These can probably be divided into two types. The first have to do with the theoretical premises entailed in corpus linguistics. Corpus work looks at how words frequently combine in actual language performance; such combinations can be of a lexical, grammatical and textual type and are linked to conventions depending on registers, genres or text-types.1 These conventions are of a different type if compared to traditional semantic and syntactic rules and may contrast these or add to them. So a first set of implications of corpus work which probably needs to be made explicit to novitiate analysts (teachers and learners) has to do with the theoretical view of what language corpus linguistics involves and the types of language structures it looks at. These in fact may be different from those which are typically dealt with within a traditional grammatical approach. The second set of implications involves a practical aspect: the method of analysis used in corpus work is not something that can be taken for granted and students should be gradually introduced to it. Introducing students to corpus methodology, however, also involves, in many senses, introducing them to corpus theory and indeed it is not easy to distinguish between the theoretical and the “practical” (and methodological) aspects. Sinclair (2003: ix) observes that as the analyst gets inside the methodology of corpus work, a large number of closely related theoretical points emerge. Corpus analysis is grounded in some theoretical premises, but performing actual corpus work helps enrich our knowledge of both such theoretical premises and of new theoretical implications. This needs to be kept in mind and I hope will become increasingly evident to the readers of this book, as we go along. To help the readers follow my argument, though, here I shall distinguish between, on the one hand, some theoretical premises which, I believe, need to

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be considered by teachers who want to introduce corpus work in the classroom and learners who want to perform it, and, on the other hand, methodological issues which need to be taken into account when guiding the learners to perform corpus work. The first will be the object of this chapter.

. Learners looking at concordance data: What do they see? Corpus analysis is a fairly novel approach for language researchers and definitely a novel one for teachers and learners. As mentioned above, concordance data require an appropriate methodology to be analyzed and interpreted. Such a methodology is based on some theoretical premises which cannot be taken for granted and need to be made clear to learners trying to grasp the method. Learners using concordances for the first time usually look for the type of information they are used to getting from grammars, dictionaries, textbooks or teachers’ explanations. That is, basically they look for either grammar rules they can recognise or evidence of word functions they know. Let me take an example. A frequent form used by authors in academic texts to attract the readers’ attention to an observation, a claim or an important point in the discussion is “worth noting /discussing /looking”. This is clearly visible from a concordance of “worth” in a corpus of academic texts (the MCB corpus, see Appendix 1). Here, in a total of 79 occurrences, “worth noting” appears 11 times, “worth discussing” 3 times and “worth looking” or “worth a look” 4 times. Synonyms or quasi synonyms of these expressions appear in another 35 occurrences. These include “worth more investigation”, “worth closer scrutiny”, worth emphasizing”, “worth mentioning”, “worth pointing out”, “worth reporting”, “worth singling out”, “worth talking about”, etc. Students who are shown such data and asked which type of recurrent language behaviour they notice, generally say that “worth” is followed by an “-ing” form. That is to say, what they immediately recognize is “the rule they know” and do not notice the recurrence of “noting” or of semantically similar forms. Their attempt is (quite obviously) to reconduct the occurrences to a type of generalization that is familiar to them (in this case “worth” + verb -ing) without actually exploring the possibility that there may be more. In this case, and in this corpus of scientific texts, the syntactic combination “worth + verb -ing” seems to select a well defined set of lexical choices, forming a lexico-grammatical pattern that is used in the texts with particular pragmatic purposes. This type of selection involves a view of language that Sinclair (1991)

Chapter 3. Theoretical premises for teachers and learners

calls “idiomatic”, which, it seems to me, needs to be made clear to studentsanalysts. Another fundamental issue in corpus linguistics, which similarly needs to be made familiar to language learners is that usage can deeply affect the meanings of the words. While students are familiar with the idea that a word can have many meanings which obviously depend on their use in context, they see these meanings as distinguished units, each attached to a label which can occasionally be spelt and pronounced in the same way. Concordances reveal meanings which are based on the usage of words. For instance, Johns (1991) shows that while “convince” and “persuade” are often considered synonyms, they are used in different ways: “convince” is recurrently followed by a “that” – clause (e.g. “media failed to convince observers that the leadership had significantly softened”), “persuade” is consistently followed by “to” and the infinitive (e.g. “I’m hoping to persuade you to take a break”). Such recurrent usages affect the appropriateness of words to context as well as their meaning (see Louw 1993; Sinclair 1996). Looking at concordance data, students tend to focus on grasping the meaning of words without actually paying attention to their usage and they tend to skip differences that may be related to the constructions they are involved in. I shall show two examples. A concordance of the noun “dealing/s” in the MCA corpus provides 52 occurrences, which show a tendency of this word to occur in “negative” contexts. This tendency is sometimes evident in the close collocates of “dealing” (e.g. “heavy dealing”, “behind-the-scenes dealing”, or occurrences of the expression “wheeling and dealing”). More often, though, it is the extended context which reveals that “dealings” is frequently used in connection to irregular or illegal businesses leading to inquiries or legal proceedings (see, for instance occurrences 1 and 2, below) or in reference to difficult dealings or to the necessity to improve them (e.g. occurrence 10 and 16, below; a longer extract of the concordance of “dealing/s” with an extended context is provided in Appendix 2: (1) of the bid began to leak out. After the formal announcement by Australian Mutual Provident yesterday of its bid Pearl’s share price rose a further 87p to 639p. Officials at the exchange said yesterday that its current investigation was a matter of routine. If they discovered evidence of share dealing ahead of the takeover by individuals using confidential information they would institute more formal inquiries. As officials began their investigations the board of directors of Pearl, led by chairman Einion Holland, said AMP’s takeover bid ‘is unacceptable and totally inadequate because it fails to reflect the group’s financial strength and prospects”. Pearl advised its shareholders to take no ac

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(2) champion Gary Mason after he knocks out Tyrell Biggs in the seventh round of their Albert Hall bout. THURSDAY: As the Old Trafford soap opera unfolds, Martin Edwards, United’s chief executive, begins legal proceedings against Knighton for alleged breach of confidentiality in their dealings. Ajax join English clubs in European exile, as UEFA bans the club for the next two years they qualify for Europe, as punishment for the previous week’s crowd trouble, when the Austria Vienna goalkeeper was felled by a metal spike. FRIDAY: The good news of Robson’s call-up to the England squad is tempered by the withdrawal of Liverpool’s John Barnes with a hamstring injury. Kni (10) are signs that institutional investors, who stood on the sidelines in 1987, are now so cash rich they are more prepared to pick up what they regard as cheap stock. Most institutions are not interested in beta and gamma stocks and once again the two market system operated with dealings exceedingly difficult in the second liners and prices often disproportionately down. BET, the services conglomerate, surprised most observers by hardly stirring. The shares were at one time 2p higher at 267p. They closed just 2p lower. But BAT Industries, bouyed by ‘unbundling” moves, slumped 60p to 758p. At one time the shares were down 88p. Other takeover candidates (16) try after the recently re-classified Abbey National. But since privatisation three years ago, the corporation has watched the ranks of its shareholders almost halve from 4.2 million. Faced with this decline and the fact that it shows no sign of stopping, the corporation is looking at how to make dealing in its shares more attractive. Obviously, there is an element of self-interest. As a private sector utility with 17 million customers, British Gas needs every channel of communication with consumers. Since a quarter of its shares are held by individuals a drift of stock to institutions could also reflect poorly on the principle of privatisation, and undermine attempts by British Gas’s new chairman, B

These examples show a tendency of “dealing/s” which is fairly recurrent and convincing. It is, however, not very evident to learners of English who do not notice it and when it is pointed out to them they hesitate to believe that it is a systematic feature of the word; they tend instead to think that the fact that so many examples occur in a negative context is either pure chance or has to do with the fact that language is frequently “negative”, as a whole. Because they are not used to thinking that there may be close relationships between the meanings of words and their usages, it is hard for them to see such “contextual negativeness” of “dealing” as characterizing the meaning and usage of this word. In this case a comparison with occurrences of the word “deal/deals” (which does not show such a “negative” tendency) helped the students work out the aura of meaning suggested by the concordance of “dealing/s”. This problem is not only related to the fact that students are non-native speakers of the language they look at. Such difficulty in noting the usages of words and their influence on the words’ meanings is observable even when students look at data in their own language. Working with Italian students,

Chapter 3. Theoretical premises for teachers and learners

I asked them to analyse two Italian “quasi-synonyms”, “mattina” and “mattino”. It is very difficult to explain the difference between these two words intuitively and when asked to, Italian students are generally not able to do so. Looking at concordances, the difference is very clear. While “specifiers” occur before “mattina” (“questa”(this), “ieri” (yesterday), “domani” (tomorrow), “domenica” (Sunday) or another day of the week), no such specification occurs before “mattino”, which is instead used in constructions such as “di buon mattino” (early in the morning) or “le 7 del mattino” (seven in the morning). An extract of the concordances of “mattina” and the full concordance of “mattino” are shown below. It seems then that while “mattina” and “mattino” are used to refer to the period of the day going from dawn to midday, only “mattina” is used to refer to the morning of a particular day. Even though the occurrences are not many (127 for “mattina” and 25 for “mattino”) and the corpus is not a large general corpus (1,000,000 words of newspaper texts), this difference sounds convincing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

ssione Irpinia? A stabilirlo sara’ , domani . Bush partira’ per Roma domani le Raidue sta dedicando, ogni domenica lo e’ . Il guadagno toccava a fine ro un massimo del 3,47% toccato a fine A DI MALTEMPO SI E’ ABBATTUTA ieri li scontrarsi frontalmente, e’ accaduto ieri ell’ attuale Cina, ha voluto accogliere ieri reso, con molti impiegati che ancora ieri rante l’ incontro con Giulio Andreotti, ieri // ((ROMA.)) Il Senato ha approvato ieri ben poco”. // Appuntamento ieri presidente della Repubblica ha avuto ieri ll’ interlocutore non e’ stata casuale. Ieri // Il processo che si e’ celebrato ieri ano, ha convocato i sindacati per questa are. // Pertanto, verra’ presentato questa inaugurazione saranno presenti, questa della Royal Air Force, e’ previsto questa . Questa . Questa nuto pagamento delle tasse. // ‘Questa all’ insegnante sotto accusa. // Questa RENTO - Cerimonia di riapertura, questa ha spiegato Materazzi, ma se questa i compiuti i collaudi. Ruffolo terra’ questa in questi giorni a Roma, e si tiene questa anza ha rinviato ogni decisione a sabato nedi’, potrebbero restare aperte il sabato tari, normalmente per praticita’ il sabato , tel. 011-6192641, mercoledi’ e venerdi’

mattina mattina mattina, mattina mattina. mattina mattina mattina mattina mattina mattina, mattina mattina mattina mattina mattina. mattina mattina, mattina mattina, mattina, mattina mattina mattina mattina mattina mattina mattina. mattina. mattina, mattina.

alle 11, l’ ufficio di presidenza ch all’ alba da Washington, fara’ ta un importantissimo ciclo. Powe il 6%, ma nella seconda meta’ d Anche Francoforte ha avuto un sul Friuli Venezia Giulia, dalla C sull’ autostrada del Pacifico nei il presidente sovietico Mikhail G si facevano luce con torce o addi a Villa Madama. // Racconta di con il voto contrario del pci, del nelle ((sic)) sede della Cisl citta con Giulio Andreotti. Ma e’ al fut infatti, mentre tutte le organizza in Corte di Assise, a Castel (Servizio a pag. 13) . RISERV presso l’ Hotel Britannique un pr l’ assessore regionale alla cultu dalla base di Gioia del Colle. (Se dal podio delle Nazioni Unite l’ i dal podio delle Nazioni Unite l’ i sono andato al Distretto Militare il ministro della Pubblica istruzio alle 10:30, del Museo Correale si presentasse in buone condizi al Consiglio dei ministri una rela alle 10:30 al Palazzetto di viale E i tifosi mugugnano, rischiano Sia pure per svolgere esclusiva accorrono ai posti di incontro e

Concordance 2. “mattina” in a 1 million word corpus of newspaper texts (extract, left sorted)

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 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Exploring corpora for ESP learning ente nuvoloso. Visibilita’ : buona con riduzioni al ente nuvoloso. Visibilita’ : buona con riduzioni al erita’ gli e’ stata sbattuta in faccia di buon e’ stata proprio incoraggiante. Recatosi di buon tta di potere minore // Domani, di buon trasporti sono inesistenti. o lavoravo e lavoro dal he era stato prelevato dagli agenti alle 05}30 del ro inviato CARLO MARINCOVICH)) Alle 4:45 del che era stato prelevato dagli agenti alle 5}30 del mo turno di qualificazione alle 14 locali (le 6 del partiti ieri da Kuwait City per Baghdad alle 6 del e con il doppio lavoro. Si e’ impegnati dalle 7 del uasi tutte donne, e’ stato catturato verso le 7 del o le autorita’ a cancellare anche la cerimonia del tte tra martedi’ e mercoledi’ scorsi. Alle dieci del ria espositiva, una struttura aperta dalle nove del i migliori. Il cielo coperto fin dalle prime ore del e amanti o gli amanti nella palestra tra le sei del a: a parte l’ atmosfera brumosa del primo ntro, limitatamente alle ore notturne e del primo a: a parte l’ atmosfera brumosa del primo ntro, limitatamente alle ore notturne e del primo eridionali. Foschie e banchi di nebbia nel primo eridionali. Foschie e banchi di nebbia nel primo steriali che, come le rose, vivono lo spazio di un

mattino mattino mattino, mattino mattino, mattino mattino mattino mattino mattino mattino mattino mattino. mattino, mattino mattino mattino mattino mattino, mattino. mattino, mattino. mattino mattino mattino;

per foschie dense e nebbie in pianura. per foschie dense e nebbie in pianura. sotto gli occhi torvi di Trifuoggi e nella fabbrica di macchinari ‘Sette o i segretari dei cinque partiti si inc alla sera per far fronte ai debiti. E’ nella sua abitazione e’ stato rimesso di domani (tv2, diretta) la penultima nella sua abitazione, veniva rimesso nel nostro Paese). Fra le novita’ la s per poi arrivare nella capitale gior alle 3 del pomeriggio, o dalle 2 dopo m Tre ore dopo, in un’ azione durata un in cui Gorbaciov avrebbe dovuto depo la vittoria: il pirata si e’ ritirato. a mezzanotte nel cuore della citta’ a sembrava voler rovinare il grande rad e le dieci di sera... Per attivita’ ses su tutte le regioni prevarra’ il cie // Nei giorni successivi l’ Italia r su tutte le regioni prevarra’ il cie // Nei giorni successivi l’ Italia r sulle pianure del nord e del centro, i sulle pianure del nord e del centro, non solo perche’ fra il parto govern

Concordance 3. “mattino” in a 1 million word corpus of newspaper texts, left sorted

to any native speaker of Italian, who would recognize the combination [specifier] + [male form “mattino”] (e.g “questo/ieri mattino”) as an odd expression. When shown this data and asked what the difference is between “mattino” and “mattina”, most Italian students do not see it, and when told that specifiers such as “questa” or “ieri” are only used before “mattina”, they reply that this does not affect the “meaning” of “mattino” and “mattina” which they perceive as “referring to the same thing in any case”. While students are right in saying that “mattino” and “mattina” share a common meaning, the difference in the usage of these words, where the presence of a specifying expression excludes “mattino” as a choice, is not something that they see immediately. It seems to me that these examples illustrate that learners looking at concordances for the first time are not only faced with new materials but also with a whole new range of things to observe as well as a new way to observe them. In particular, they are asked to look at characteristics of language which do not have a central position in traditional language teaching, such as the fact that there may be close relationships between grammatical and lexical choices and that meanings and usages are more intrinsically connected than we used to think. In order to enable students to appreciate the type of information they may get from a concordance, they need to be familiarized with a different view of language and in particular with the fact that logical combinations account only in part for language use. Language use is also massively based on combinations

Chapter 3. Theoretical premises for teachers and learners

which are of an idiomatic rather than a logical nature and as such cannot be explained rationally. In the next sections, I introduce such a view of language and explain why it is relevant in a language learning context.

. Language as idiom vs. language as a logical system While the Chomskian approach has favoured the rationalist idea that language can be reduced to a logical system and can be accounted for in terms of cognitive plausibility, there is another psycholinguistic approach which criticizes this view. Bolinger (1976) for instance criticizes the idea that language is generated by applying rules to combine words and morphemes into sentences, noting that many rule-based combinations do not seem to occur in practice. Thus we say “a long time ago” and “a short time ago”, but only “long ago” not “short ago”; we say “he looked at me suspiciously” and “he regarded me suspiciously”, but only “he looked at me”, not “he regarded me”. Bolinger suggests that we do not produce certain forms because we have no memory of them, “we have not heard it done” (1976: 4). Instead of using rules to combine words and morphemes, he suggests that we produce most utterances using multi-word chunks which we have stored as wholes and only subsequently do we process and divide them up into smaller units. Other researchers have criticized logical approaches because these fail to account for the rather pervasive phenomenon called “idioms”. Johnson-Laird (1993), for instance, has pointed out that while the logical approach relegates idioms to the sidelines, idioms are absolutely pervasive and this is one of the principal reasons for their importance in language: Yet it is difficult to speak spontaneously without lapsing into idiomatic usage. Try it with a foreigner, and you will see that you are often aware of using an idiom only after the event. Even in explaining an idiom, you can find to your expense that you are using another (1993: ix).

One of the main problems of the logical-rationalist theories of language has to do with the reductive view of idioms that they imply. The problem does not consist in the fact that the rationalist approach ignores idioms or relegates them to exceptions, but in the fact that it regards idioms only as “fixed” units. Stock et al. (1993: 229) refer to this view as the “idioms-are-big-words” view and underlines that such a view has the effect of depriving the question of how idioms are understood (and produced) of any really interesting or problematic properties. Glucksberg (1993) argues that one of the main reasons why

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

idioms are interesting is not their fixedness but their compositionality. The fact that idioms are memorized as single units does not mean that they can only be treated as such. He claims that the literal meaning of the constituents must make a contribution and this is demonstrated by the fact that they can be exploited in creative modifications of the conventional idiom. Glucksberg quotes the following as plausible and acceptable examples of modifications of “by and large”: Tom: By and large, the economy seems to be doing well. Ned: Not so by and large: Have you seen the latest unemployment figures?

Or Ned: By but not so large! Have you considered . . . .

(1993: 7)

So while on the one hand, we have the rationalist theories which support the idea that language is generated by combining bits according to logical rules, on the other, we have studies on idioms which claim that while idioms are probably memorized and stored as units, they can be subsequently chopped up and re-combined to form new chunks. So, what derives from the discussion above is that both the idea that language is purely or mainly a logical system and the idea that it is instead made up of fixed multi-word chunks that can barely be altered in their composition are reductive. Studies of idioms in the psycholinguistic area (of which a nice collection is provided by Cacciari & Tabossi 1993) seem instead to suggest that these are probably just the two ends of a continuum going from maximum to minimum compositionality with a range of degrees in the middle. Corpus work provides evidence that language is produced in disparate ways along a cline going from fixed, barely-separable chunks to phrases and sentences which are more clearly of a compositional nature. I suggest that such evidence, deriving from corpus work, can be used with language learners to make such a continuum clearer and to organize tasks which help students to produce language not only on the basis of the rational rules they are familiar with, but to consider also other types of units and factors which contribute to composing language chunks.

. The contribution of corpus work to a “new” idea of language compositionality The link between the evidence provided by corpus work and the idea that language could be conceived as a continuum going from maximum fixedness to

Chapter 3. Theoretical premises for teachers and learners

maximum compositionality has not escaped notice in corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics in fact posed the problem of re-defining principles for interpreting language occurrences. Such re-definition has developed through a series of studies and researches. Here I focus on three issues which seem to me of central importance for language teaching and learning. The first regards the distinction between two ways of looking at language, which Sinclair (1991, 1996) calls the “open-choice principle” and the “idiom principle”. This constitutes the frame in which the second and the third issues are probably to be viewed. The second issue, introduced by Sinclair (1996), concerns a problematization of the concept of “unit of meaning”. The third issue was introduced by Louw (1993) and can be connected to the compositional property of collocations and idioms. In this section, I shall illustrate and discuss these three issues. .. The open-choice principle and the idiom principle Sinclair (1991: 109–110) suggests that in order to explain the way in which meaning arises from language texts one should operate with two distinct interpretative principles: the open-choice principle and the idiom principle. The open-choice principle entails a view of texts as the result of a series of complex choices. Once a unit is completed (a morpheme, a word, a phrase), a large range of grammatical choices opens up to combine that unit with other units and build the text up: This is probably the normal way of seeing and describing language. It is often called “slot-and-filler” model, envisaging texts as a series of slots which have to be filled from a lexicon which satisfies local restraints. At each slot, virtually any word can occur. (Sinclair 1991: 109)

Rationalist theories of language see it as a logical system which relies on the open-choice principle. For instance, Chomskian generative grammar is based on open choices relying on a system of morpho-syntactic rules. The openchoice principle is the principle on which most grammars depend. The idiom principle, instead, is based on the view that the language user has available to her or him a number of semi-preconstructed chunks which constitute single choices and are generally used as such or with slight modification. The expression “bear in mind” for instance is generally used as such or with limited variations like “take/keep/hold in mind” and many choices which might be plausible according to the open-choice principle (e.g. “carry in mind”) simply sound odd. Traditionally the idiom principle has been put

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

forward to account for those instances the open-choice principle could not account for. Corpus work has shown that language is much more a matter of “idiom” than was traditionally thought and that many words have a striking tendency to occur together or in each other’s vicinity. Concordances in fact highlight that choice is not so open in word combinations and this does not only concern expressions like “by and large” or “all of a sudden” which are “fixed” even intuitively.2 A search for “a pretty” in the written component of the BNC found 1161 occurrences. Analysis of a hundred of these, randomly selected, revealed that although collocates were considerably varied, there were still clear recurrent features of a semantic nature. Leaving aside fixed idioms such as “a pretty penny” or “a pretty pass”, four main semantic categories of words seem to follow “a pretty”: a “girl/woman” category (“lady”, “maid”, “face”, etc.: about 30%); a “place” category (“village”, “garden”, etc.: 20%); a “picture/sight” category (15%), and a “dress/furniture” category (10%). Examples like this one show that even in those cases where no “fixed” or figurative expressions are involved, choices in word combinations may still be restricted. This seems to me an important point for language learners in general and ESP learners in particular, which they can be made familiar with by corpus work or be explained explicitly. In the case of the usage of “worth” in scientific texts that we saw in 3.1, above, not only does “worth” select an “-ing” verb form, in a corpus of academic writing, it also selects verbs from a particular semantic area (“noting”, “looking”, “pointing out”, etc.) which contribute to make the pattern “worth noting” a conventional, idiomatic one in scientific writing. .. The search for units of meaning The idiom principle suggests that words tend to combine according to a limited set of choices and that language production is much more a matter of collocation than was traditionally expected. Sinclair (1996) observes that one of the limits of language perspectives based on traditional grammars is that they tend to reinforce the idea that units of grammar coincide with units of meaning. Sinclair argues that words’ usages and meanings are very closely interrelated, but that such interrelation is not evident in traditional grammar descriptions: Words enter into meaningful relations with other words around them, and yet all our current descriptions marginalize this massive contribution to meaning. The main reason for the marginalization is that grammars are always given priority, and grammars barricade themselves against the individual patterns of words (1996: 76).

Chapter 3. Theoretical premises for teachers and learners

Compounds are the typical example. Compounds are formed by two words, each of which has its own meaning. When associated, however, they create a third, new meaning, which is partly or totally independent from the first two ones. As an example, Sinclair quotes the compound “blackbird”. This phenomenon is not however restricted to compounds. Think of expressions like “of course” (where “of ” and “course” lose their individual meanings completely) or “black and white” (where “black” and “white” take on the more extensive meaning of “black, white, gray and their nuances” and refers to “non colour film or TV”). Thus, the relation between “of ” and “course” in the expression “of course” and that between “black”, “and” and “white” in the expression “black and white” does not simply add up the meanings of the two/three words that form the expression, but it creates a novel unit of meaning different from the preceding ones. In the Italian example we considered above, showing occurrences of “mattina” and “mattino”, the fact that our current grammar descriptions marginalize the contribution of words to meaning in Sinclair’s terms is particularly clear. “Questa mattina”, indicates a specific point in time and is obviously a different concept as compared to “il mattino” which is used more frequently in time duration expressions. Though, when we (as well as the students) come to describe “mattino” and “mattina” we tend to dis-associate these words from their collocates and consider them mainly (or only) as synonyms. Relations between words are such that it is often difficult to define the exact limits of a unit of meaning. Sinclair (1996) shows that corpus work accounts for at least four types of meaningful relations that words entertain with other words around them. In corpus linguistics, these are called: collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody. The first three (collocation, colligation and semantic prosody) are based on “vicinity” between words and/or expressions. Collocation is the best-known and is defined as “the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other” (Sinclair 1991: 170). The relationship between “of ” and “course” and “black”, “and” and “white” is of a collocational type. Other collocations are “a pretty penny” and “a pretty pass”, which can be observed as frequent combinations involving the word “pretty”, as noted above. Colligation is, instead, the relationship between a word and a grammatical class of words. This may occasionally coincide with traditional syntactic rules: for instance the relationship between “worth” and an “-ing” verb, which we saw above. Colligation, however, also includes and accounts for other “new” patterns. For instance the relationship between “mattina” and a “specifier” (questa/ieri/domenica . . .), which excludes “mattino” as a possible choice to translate “this morning”. Semantic preference is a concept

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

similar to that of colligation. Indeed it is again the relationship between a word and a class of words. The class of words, in this case, is not a grammatical class of words but a semantic class of words. The example we looked at above where, in academic writing, “worth” tended to occur with verbs such as “noting”, “highlighting”, “observing” is an example of semantic preference, where the “ing”-verbs following “worth” share the meaning of “making evident”. Another example of semantic preference, taken from Sinclair (1996), is that of the expression “to/with the naked eye” which shows a striking tendency to occur with expressions of “visibility” (e.g. “visible to the naked eye”, “you can see with the naked eye”, “look at with the naked eye”, etc.). The first three types of relationships are based on a tendency of particular words and/or expressions to come together, creating collocational or colligational patterns. The fourth type of relationship mentioned above, semantic prosody, is a slightly different concept. Semantic prosody does not only have to do with the relationship between words, but it also involves the way words affect each other with their meanings. The term “prosody”, which is generally used in linguistics to refer to the sound or rhythm of words, is applied here to the sound of meanings rather than phonemes and particularly to the way in which words or expressions create an aura of meaning capable of affecting words around them. With reference to the expression “to/with the naked eye”, which we saw above, Sinclair (1996) notes that not only is there quite a clear semantic preference for expressions indicating “visibility” (“visible”, “look”, “see”), but also that words occurring in the vicinity of the expressions indicating “visibility” consistently suggest “difficulty in visibility”. Some examples taken from Sinclair’s concordance of “naked eye” are: “too small to see with the naked eye”, “it is not really visible to the naked eye”, “cannot always be perceived by the naked eye”, “even though nothing is visible to the naked eye”, “human ovum is barely visible to the naked eye”, etc. (Sinclair 1996: 103). The fact of occurring consistently in a context indicating low visibility affects the expression “to/with the naked eye” permeating it with a negative meaning and the fact of consistently occurring in contexts where such difficulty is expressed gives it an aura which probably makes it “sound better” in these types of contexts rather than in others. Independently of how we want to call these types of relationships in the classroom (these concepts may not be so clear-cut and easy to grasp, see also Partington 2004), once they are pointed out to the students, it is much clearer to them what they may want to look at in a concordance. It becomes much easier, for instance, to see the significance of the relationship between a specifier and the word “mattina” and the negative aura of meaning connected with the

Chapter 3. Theoretical premises for teachers and learners

usage of the word “dealing”. In Chapter 5, I shall suggest some activities to familiarize students with corpus methodology and help them see these types of relationships between words. Simple, plain explanations of basic concepts like those dealt with here may sometimes, however, be helpful in classroom interaction to guide the students to read and interpret the data. .. “Unusuality” and creativity It is probably clear from the discussion above that both the idiom principle and the relationships that words seem to entertain with each other are based on a description of recurrent, conventional language behaviour. As well as demonstrating the predictability of language by revealing conventional usage, observing recurrences can also help cast light on unconventional, unusual linguistic behaviour, or “unusuality” as Partington (1998: 121) calls it. “Creative” uses of language, in fact, often exploit expectations raised by conventional language use and “create effect” by not fulfilling them. An example illustrating this, can be found in Bolinger (1976), who quotes the following title of a poem by Dylan Thomas:3 A grief ago

Bolinger notes that this line owes much of its effect to its failure to fulfil the expectation that “ago” generally co-occurs with an expression of time. Precisely because “ago” generally refers to time, time is evoked and attributed to “grief ”. Makkai (1993) refers to the failure to fulfil readers’ expectations as logopoeia, which he calls “the dance of intellect among words”. Quoting Ezra Pound he describes logopoeia as follows: [Logopoeia] employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play. (Makkai 1993: 305)

By highlighting semantic prosodies, concordances can sometimes throw light on such creative uses achieved with logopoeia. Louw (1993) looks at poems by the poet Philip Larkin and shows that semantic prosody as revealed through concordances can, in some cases, account for Larkin’s use of logopoeia. In particular, Louw (1993) notes that a concordance of “utterly” in the original 18- million-word Cobuild corpus shows a consistently “negative” semantic prosody, occurring with words like “arid”, “burned”, “demolished”, “destroying”, “insensible”, “meaningless”, etc. With respect to this, the last line of Philip

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

Larkin’s “First Sight” seems particularly evocative, maintaining the negative aura of its conventional usage: First Sight Lambs that learn to walk in snow When their bleating clouds the air Meet a vast unwelcome, know Nothing but a sunless glare. Newly stumbling to and fro All they find outside the fold, Is a wretched width of cold As they wait beside the ewe, Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies Hidden round them, waiting too, Earth’s immeasurable surprise. They could not grasp if they knew, What so soon will wake and grow Utterly unlike the snow.

While this evokes a series of suggestions for using concordances for the teaching of literature, which I shall not go into here (but see e.g. Louw 1993, 1997; Kettemann 1997; Kettemann & Marko 2004), concordances also help to account for creative usages in non-poetical, non-literary texts. Again looking at the concordance of “utterly”, Louw (1993) notes that although the context it occurs in is recurrently negative, there are 4 instances out of 99 where “utterly” co-occurs with “positive” adjectives (“dedicated”, “good”, “grand” and “venerable”). Reading the extended context of all of these four examples, one can notice that they carry a fairly obvious ironic intention and irony here seems to be achieved by playing precisely on the effect created by combining words with a positive connotation and the “negative” expectation raised by the use of “utterly”, or its semantic prosody. It is probably clear from the examples above that creativity is often achieved by playing on conventional, recurrent word behaviour. So highlighting what is conventional and usual in word combinations also offers a chance to account for unusual language behaviour. Manipulating conventional meaning to achieve particular effects is a fairly widespread phenomenon and conventional relationships between words are often “played around with” to generate novel and creative meaning or to attract the readers’ attention. Partington (1998), for instance, notes that many newspaper headlines particularly in the arts and sports sections create such effects

Chapter 3. Theoretical premises for teachers and learners

by manipulating proverbs, quotations, sayings, idioms or collocations. Such “fixed” expressions are quoted only in part to raise an expectation (for the following conventional part) which is then left unfulfilled. See, for instance, the five headlines below (taken from Partington 1998: 122–3). The italicized text recalls well-known titles of plays (Look Back in Anger and Murder in the Cathedral) in the first two cases, a line of a popular Pink Floyd song (The Wall) in the third example, a popular character in fairy tales (“Prince Charming”) and a proverb (“A bridge too far”), in the fourth and fifth examples respectively: 1. Defiant Saddam looks back in anger and pride 2. TELEVISION: Murder of the cathedral 3. Another brick at the wall: Della Couling reports on the attempts of German playwrights to cross the East-West divide 4. Prints charming: This week, you can visit the Royal Academy and take an Old Master home with you 5. DANCE: A fridge too far

Manipulation of conventional language patterns then may lead to the achievement of novel text, which may be either very effective and original, as in the case of good poetry, or a bit less so, as in the case of newspaper titles where such “playing around” seem to be rather recurrent and systematic. What is interesting in this creative usage of recurrent word combinations from a learners’ point of view is the very fact that creating novel text can be done by manipulating usual, conventional text. Such a possibility, which is not familiar in language pedagogy and indeed often inhibited, as it may lead to plagiarism, can instead be very usefully exploited in ESP writing and translation, as we shall see in Chapter 6 (on this topic see also Pecorari 2003).

. Learners, “idioms” and corpus work While learners may initially fail to appreciate the type of information that can be derived from concordance data, as non-native users of a language, they are very much aware of the obstacles posed by idiomatic uses of the foreign language for their understanding and participating in their foreign language interactions. Some of my undergraduate students, for instance, used to thank their (English-mother-tongue) teachers using the expression “thank you for your availability”, which is a literal translation of the Italian expression “grazie per la sua disponibilità”. In the Italian expression, “disponibilità” is used in an idiomatic combination which is uncommon in using the English match “avail-

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

ability”. Having received “strange smiles” in response to their thanks, students asked me if there was anything wrong with such expression. We generated a concordance of “thank you for” and “thanks for” from the BNC Sampler (the only concordance tool at hand at that moment). We found no occurrence of “thanks for/thank you for your availability” but we found several occurrences of “thanks for/thank you for your help”, which the students immediately recognized as “that’s what I wanted” and realized that in using “availability” they were probably affected by the Italian idiomatic usage. So, after thanking me “for my availability” (in Italian), my English native speaker colleagues noted that students started thanking them “for their help”. Such examples are quite common in language teaching and learning and Johnson-Laird (1993: vii) underlines this “effect of immediate recognition” of idioms when considering another language: a simple litmus, though not an infallible one, for whether a sense is idiomatic is to consider its expression in another language. An Italian speaker, for example, does not say, ‘mi stai tirando la gamba’ (literally, “you are pulling my leg”) to express the idea of a joke, but rather ‘mi prendi in giro’.

“Mi prendi in giro” in its turn loses its idiomatic sense when translated literally into English (“you take me around/on a tour”). Corpus work provides a tool by which students can explore such “idiomatic” areas of language, which, as foreign speakers, they often perceive as an obstacle in their interactions. It provides students with the means to highlight conventional combinations of words and they may eventually achieve awareness of the pervasiveness, complexity and potential productivity of such language conventions as described above. Learning to perform corpus work and performing it, then, provides students with an opportunity to observe language from an “idiomatic” point of view and eventually to take this point of view into account in their foreign language production.

. Conclusion The “idiom-principle” proposes a new way of looking at language which highlights the fact that words tend to combine not only on the basis of logicorationalistic rules, but, to a large extent, also on the basis of stipulated sociolinguistic conventions. Such conventions account for the semantic and pragmatic meanings that words contribute to achieve in texts. These conventions also provide a basis to interpret “non-convention”, deviant or creative usages of

Chapter 3. Theoretical premises for teachers and learners

language which are produced and recognized as deliberate manipulations of conventional patterns. This also opens a new way to look at language creativity which is not probably a familiar one to teachers and learners and which seems an interesting object of consideration in language pedagogy. In the sections above, my discussion focused mainly on what the students can achieve through corpus work both in terms of process and results. These could be summarized as: a. a less reductive idea of language (as compared to that involved in the traditional rationalist paradigm) including both idiomatic and rationalist aspects of language as two poles of a continuum; b. information about idiomatic aspects of language behaviour such as interactional routines (“thanks for your help” vs. “thanks for your availability”) and fixed or semi-fixed expressions in general (“worth noting”, “heavy dealing”). This seems to me a starting point in demonstrating why it may be worthwhile to ask students to perform corpus work. Some suggestions about guiding the students to achieve methodological instruments to perform corpus work and, also, familiarise themselves with the concepts illustrated here are provided in Chapter 5. Before that, though, there are considerations to be made regarding the type of text-corpora we want to analyse in the classroom. This leads me to another key topic in this book, that is corpora and ESP.

Notes . The notion of genre I use here is derived from Swales 1990. For a discussion of the notions of register, genre and text-type see Bondi (1999b: 7–26). . “By and large” and “all of a sudden” occur respectively 485 and 393 in the BNC. A look at 100 randomly selected occurrences of “by and” showed that it is followed by “large” in half of the instances, the remaining ones revealing no productive use of the pattern “by and large” (when “by” is followed by “and”, the latter generally introduces a new sentence, e.g. “the thunder had passed them by and the voice of the seas changed”). A look at 100 randomly selected occurrences of “all of a” showed that in 72 cases it is in fact followed by “sudden”. The pattern “all of a” seems, though, a productive one forming combinations such as “all of a piece” and more interestingly “all of a” + a time expression (“a week”, “a month”, “a fortnight”). . Dylan Thomas’ title “A grief ago” is also discussed by Leech (1969: 29–31) as an example of deviation from common usage for the purpose of achieving creative effect.

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Chapter 4

Corpus work, ESP and language learners

. Introduction: From small to specialized corpora As mentioned in the first chapter, most studies regarding corpus use in a language teaching and learning environment have traditionally been based on corpora roughly put together by teachers-researchers to meet some specific teaching purpose (see Tribble & Jones 1990; Johns & King 1991; Ma 1993a). These preliminary studies consistently (Johns 1994; Miller 1994; Robinson 1994; and see also Tan 2002a) observed that using corpus work with language students seemed to stimulate an “investigative”, explorative approach to language learning. While this seemed an attractive teaching/learning point in corpus work, through the nineties such pioneering projects shifted their focus from such pedagogic issues to more technical, descriptive ones. In particular, studies in corpus design and representativeness (Atkins et al. 1992; Biber 1993; Oaks 1998) made it increasingly clear that corpus construction needed to be based on sampling criteria that made the corpus reliable as a language sample. Those “home-made” corpora which were used in preliminary teaching experiments, needed somehow to be re-thought to make the design criteria clearer and the size adequate to their purposes in order to render them more reliable instruments on the whole. Studies in corpus design made it clear that corpus size depended a lot on both the corpus’s content and on its sampling criteria. While hundred-million word collections were necessary to sample, for instance, contemporary British English, a much smaller and specialized set of texts was needed to sample, for instance, medical research papers. Indeed, large as it might be, a corpus of general English often failed to capture features of very specialized language, and a smaller, specialized corpus was often found more suitable. As Tribble (1997) notes: If one wishes to investigate the lexis of a particular current domain (e.g. health) a specialist micro-corpus can often be more useful than a much larger general corpus. For example, in the written component of the BNC Sampler

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

(1,000,000 words) there are no instances of “cancers”. An Encarta® microcorpus of health articles (24,805 words) gives 33 usefully contextualised examples. (Tribble 1997: 112–3)

These considerations underlined the limit of the traditional distinction between large and small corpora making it clear that a more convincing one could be drawn between general corpora like the BNC, representing e.g. British English, and specialized corpora such as those concentrating on medical or business language (see also Bernardini & Gavioli 1999). While the shift from the idea of “small” corpora to that of “specialized” corpora was necessary and useful and it is probably nowadays impossible to talk about a small corpus that is not, in some way, also specialized, such a shift had a number of implications which I shall discuss in this chapter. The first concerns ESP proper. Focusing on a more restricted range of topics and texttypes, specialized corpora became a more reliable descriptive tool for specific language (sub)domains (e.g. medical writing; see Gavioli 2000): this opened up new descriptive potentials of corpora for ESP teaching and suggested ways to solve traditional ESP teaching problems, such as that of specialised lexis. I shall discuss this issue in the next section of this chapter. While the first point has to do with suggestions that corpus analysis can provide for working out ESP contents, the second point has to do with a methodological problem. In particular, there may be a potential confusion between what we mean by “specialized” language and what we mean with “specialized” teaching/learning purposes, and, consequently, what we mean by a “specialized” corpus for teaching and learning. In Section 2 of this chapter I attempt to distinguish between these concepts and I complete the definition I provided in the introduction to this book of what should be intended by “specialised corpora” here. A third implication regards the distinction between specialized and general corpora. While the two labels help to identify different types of corpora, constructed with different criteria, the distinction should not be taken as completely clear-cut as one risks overlooking the continuum that links up specialized and general language and the fact that “specialized” is defined in reference to “general” (Section 3). In the fourth section of this chapter, I discuss the issue of specialised corpora in a learning perspective and I point out some of the reasons why specialised corpora can be used as effective learning tools in both ESP and non-ESP environments.

Chapter 4. Corpus work, ESP and language learners

. ESP and specialised corpora: A happy marriage .. ESP, quantitative data and corpus analysis: A natural development As mentioned above, studies in corpus representativeness made it increasingly clear that, given their size, small corpora could not provide adequate samples of a general language population and a smaller, more limited population was probably a more suitable target. Thus small corpora increasingly became “specialized” corpora, namely collections of texts similar in topic (e.g. medical texts) and type (e.g. academic articles). Obviously such a shift attracted great interest in ESP circles, where such small, easy-to-collect specialized language samples were in many senses considered precisely what was needed. Following Kennedy (1992), in Chapter 2, I have observed that quantitative data has been taken as relevant in the description and teaching of the English language since at least the 1920s and that many researchers, over this period, have engaged in the manual analysis of “corpora” of language to determine the frequency of the use of words, expressions and other features. While Kennedy’s observation regarded the description and teaching of general English, the relevance of quantitative data seems to be even more important in ESP. The quantitative nature of certain characteristic aspects of ESP has traditionally been recognised in, for instance, the recurrence of particular lexical items or grammatical structures, such as noun phrases in the language of medical science (e.g. Gotti 1991). In a paper entitled ”On the language of physical science”, Halliday (1988: 162) defines scientific English as a functional variety, or register, and describes it in terms that are essentially quantitative: A register is a cluster of associated features having a greater-than-random (or rather, greater than predicted by their unconditioned probabilities) tendency to co-occur

Probably because the expertise of a linguist may often not be enough to describe features of ESP and either collaboration with “experts” (Johns & DudleyEvans 1980/1988) or analysis of specialised texts seemed inevitable, the necessity to focus on actual language occurrence and analyse it has traditionally been considered a main issue in ESP descriptions. A 1962 paper by Barber, which has subsequently been very influential in the foundation and development of ESP studies (see Swales 1988: 1–2; Dudley-Evans & St. John 1998: 20), is based on a “corpus” of about 23,000 words, formed by three research articles in different scientific domains (engineering, chemistry and astronomy) of which the author manually calculates data such as average sentence length, number of

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

clauses per sentence, occurrence of most frequent modal verbs and occurrences of different verbal tenses and aspects. As Swales (1988: 1) notes, this paper was also used as an argument for not teaching the progressive tense in courses of scientific English, as the frequency of this form emerged as strikingly low. It can be seen that both the method of analysis and the thesis supported by Barber (1962) are very close to methods and theses in modern ”corpus-analysis”. So, while methods based on corpus linguistics have represented a challenge in descriptions of general English, because ESP descriptions and teaching rely heavily on collections of “specialized” texts, it seems to me that such methods represent a sort of natural development in this field. .. ESP and corpus work The potential relevance of corpus analysis for ESP teaching is well acknowledged these days (Dudley-Evans & St. Johns 1998: 31) and from a teacher’s point of view there are many potential applications of corpus work to ESP. Some of these are studies of variation across different genres (see Hyland 2002a for an overview), teaching genre conventions (Tribble 2000; Thompson 2000, 2001) or the analysis of the students’ needs (for EAP, see e.g. Thompson 2002). In this section, I focus, in particular, on two more areas of interest that seem to be on the one hand especially fruitful for ESP description and teaching, and on the other, particularly relevant for learners using corpora as learning tools – as we shall see in Chapter 6. The first area regards the use of specialised corpora to complement genre studies; the second regards the selection and teaching of specialized lexis. ... Corpus work and genre Referring in particular to EAP, Hunston (2002: 198) notes that for ESP teachers the issue of “what to teach” as opposed to “how to teach” may be of particular significance. Students who need to be guided to writing academic papers or essays may need to be made aware of those salient features which characterize such genres. Borrowing the Hallidayan notions of ideational and interpersonal, Hunston (2002) observes that corpus work may complement genre studies in either of these two respects. Some corpus studies focus on the typical phraseologies used in certain academic genres, thus leading to a discussion of ideational meaning, while others, instead, focus on the way that the writers in different disciplines create their relationship with their readers.

Chapter 4. Corpus work, ESP and language learners

To the first type belong studies such as Gledhill (1995, 2000) or Luzon Marco (2000). Gledhill (1995) suggests that typical phraseology (intended as recurrent combinations of words) can reflect rhetorical choices: Thus phraseology merges collocation as ‘the preferred way of saying things’ with rhetoric as ‘the dress of thought’ (as Dickens worded it) (1995: 11).

Gledhill (1995, 2000) uses a corpus of academic articles on cancer research. His corpus is organized in sub-corpora each containing a type of headed subsection (Introductions, Methods, Results, Discussions, Conclusions). Gledhill compares the various sub-corpora using Wordsmith’s keywords feature and finds out that there are words that are significant in the different subsections. For instance, some significant words in the introduction sub-sections are “such”, “can” and “we”. “Such” plays an important role in reformulating biochemical processes (e.g. “antitumour agents such as NMU”), “can” is used to expresses potential clinical processes (e.g. “methods can be considered”, “alterations can be prepared”) or to explain a biochemical’s “ability to” operate in a novel way, “we” is used in reference to the papers’ authors and primarily to express the rhetorical move “occupy the research gap” (Swales 1990). Gledhill then shows that rhetorical patterns are often “lexicalised” through recurrent phraseological patterns. This can be particularly useful in the teaching of writing. Weber (2001) discusses a teaching experiment where students isolated generic features of legal essays and used the concordancer to find out the most frequent lexical patterns which seemed to lexicalise such generic features. These patterns were then adopted and adapted by students in their own writing of legal essays (see also Flowerdew 1993b; Henry & Roseberry 2001; Bondi 2001). As mentioned above, the second type of studies focuses on language features that indicate ways in which writers build up a relationship with their readers. One such study is, for instance, Hyland (1998). It concentrates on the semantic category of “hedging” in a corpus of biology research articles. Hyland identifies a number of “hedgers” (modal auxiliaries, verbs such as “suggest” or “indicate”, epistemic adjectives or adverbs, e.g “possible”, “possibly”) which are used in academic paper writing to perform either of the following main functions (abridged from Hunston 2002: 203): a. They indicate the relation between what is said and what happened during the actual empirical work or experiment, b. they indicate or limit the comittment of writers in their claims or criticism, c. they construct the identity of both writers and readers as individuals conforming to the norms of the scientific community

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

In a teaching perspective, Hyland (2002b) shows that while students often see academic writing as a “very impersonal” and factual type of writing, there is instead large scope for writer-reader negotiation of identity and such negotiation may differ in type across disciplines. He suggests that corpus work such as analyzing concordances of personal pronouns generated from corpora of academic paper texts in different fields may help students achieve awareness of ways in which such writer-reader relationships are negotiated and created. Both Gledhill (1995, 2000) and Hyland (1998, 2002b) indicate ESP issues that corpus work may help to highlight or define. While Gledhill works in the direction of identifying recurrent lexicalizations of rhetorical moves, Hyland proposes a series of lexical items performing recurrent interpersonal functions in academic writing. Both features provide a characterization of academic writing which seems to attract ESP students’ interest. ... Corpus work and lexis The fact that corpus linguistics opens up a new way of looking at lexis and gives it a more important and “serious” position in language description is well argued in the literature on corpus linguistics (Sinclair 1996; Hoey 2004 in particular). Parallely, in language teaching, this has been accompanied by a re-consideration of the centrality of the problem of teaching lexical and collocational phenomena (that was put forward particularly strongly by Lewis 1993, 2000 and was discussed at great length in e.g. Nattinger and De Carrico 1992). A particularly interesting potential of specialized corpora in ESP description and teaching is that concerning vocabulary. The use of technical lexis (and the concepts related to it) has in fact constituted a traditional “burning issue” in ESP teaching and learning. Since their beginning, ESP studies have tackled the problem with some uneasiness, arguing that teaching technical lexis “was not the job of the language teacher” (see e.g. Higgins 1967 or Trimble 1985) in the attempt to give others (“expert” colleagues or presumably “expert” students) the responsibility of making sense of texts as a whole. As Trimble observes: It seems rather pointless for a teacher not trained in science to ”teach” technical vocabulary to students who have already learned or are learning this highly specialised lexis in their subject-matter courses (1985: 128).

Barber’s attempt (1962) to calculate items to teach in a course of English for science was an important step in the direction of producing an ESP syllabus, but Barber too, focused primarily on grammar structures, overlooking lexis proper. ESP exploratory studies seemed to be looking for ways to by-pass rather than solve the problem of teaching lexis and while authors seemed to agree

Chapter 4. Corpus work, ESP and language learners

on the idea that some “semi-technical” vocabulary should be dealt with in the ESP language classroom, their ideas about what could be considered “semi” diverged a lot, ranging from Higgins’s category of “frame words” (1967), which included rather general words such as “heal” to Trimble’s (1985: 30) category of “sub-technical” words including “dog”, a mechanical engineering term meaning “an adjustable stop used in gears”, which seems, instead, pretty technical to the lay person. The majority of computer programs developed for corpus analysis permit one to perform automatically those operations which Barber (1962) performed manually. This helps ESP “practitioners” (as defined by Robinson 19911 ) to rapidly get an idea of which recurrent lexical items are used in a given collection of texts (medical, physical or otherwise). To take just one example, an early study by Higgins (1967) about teaching English to science students underlines the necessity of providing students with some “frame words” which caused difficulty in comprehension and production and which were frequent in the language of science. For the medical science, he suggests that some of these might be: “symptom/s”, “diagnose”/“diagnosis”, “treatment/s” and the verbs “treat”, “relapse”, “heal”, and “cure”. A look at a list of keywords from a medical corpus of research articles dealing with hepatitis C, shows that while the nouns “symptom” and “treatment” (singular and plural), and the verb “diagnose” are in fact frequent words, the verb “relapse” occurs just once and there are no occurrences of forms of the verbs “cure” and “heal”. This list also shows that there are other very frequent words which might be included in the list of “frame words”, notably “patient/s” and “disease/s”. Such a list, then, quickly provides quantitative data which suggest: a. a pool of frequent words which may be taken into consideration by the teacher (e.g. “patient/s”, “disease/s”), b. that some words which seem intuitively frequent (even to the discipline’s expert) are not, and it may be the case that their frequency depends on the type of text or the situation involved, as is the case of the verbs “relapse”, “heal” and “cure” which are quite rare in medical research articles, making it necessary to check whether they are frequent in other types of texts, such as patient-doctor conversations or popular medical literature. Corpus work provided criteria to generate “specialized word lists” by, for example, analyzing corpora of academic English. Nation (2001b: 191) notes that there are several ways of making lists of academic vocabulary. Here, I mention three: first, if the domain is very very specialized (as in the case of some electronic or medical sub-fields) a simple calculation of word frequency may highlight most important specialized words; second, corpora of texts in different specialized domains can be compared to show key lexical characteristics

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

in each corpus; third, corpora of texts in different specialized domains can be compared with corpora of non-academic texts to reveal specialized vs. general lexical features. While Nation suggests that the criteria to calculate word frequency and derive characterizing words depend on the type of corpus and on its level of specialization, corpus tools seems to provide useful means to generate such word lists. The Academic Word List (a list of recurrent words in general academic English, Coxhead 2000), for instance, has been drawn up on the basis of a comparison between a 3,500,000-word corpus of academic English (composed of various sub-domains) and a corpus of fiction writing of the same size to extract those words which seemed common to a wide range of academic texts as compared to fiction writing. Vocabulary was then sub-divided according to range and frequency in the different sub-domains. The contribution of corpus work in dealing with specialized vocabulary should not, I think, be underestimated. Such lists of academic words have in fact been profitably used in teaching specialized vocabulary (see Ward 1999). The traditional difficulty encountered by language teachers in dealing with technical lexis and concepts created a sort of gap between: a. the text with its rhetorical and stylistic choices, which it was the job of the linguist or the language teacher to teach and b. its “meaning”, with technical lexis and concepts, which were instead the job of the “technical discipline experts”. Although attempts have been made to make the two sides interact (with e.g. the “teamteaching” program, Johns & Dudley-Evans 1980, or by comparisons of popularized and scientific literature, Robinson 1989), this issue still seems a burning one (see Nation 2001b: 203–5). It seems to me that corpus work offers a “linguistic” means to explore “technical” concepts and a way to bridge the gap. I will consider some learning implications of this in Chapter 6 below.

. Specialised language and specialized teaching purposes While the problem of distinguishing between specialized language and specialized purposes in ESP is not a new one (see Widdowson 1983, 1998a), it is worthwhile to recall what one means by “specialized” corpora in ESP with reference to both language and teaching and learning purposes. First, when we talk about specialized corpora, we mean a corpus designed in such a way as to collect a sample of a sub-language. Depending on the research or teaching purposes, sub-languages can be of many types from the less to the more “specialized”: academic language, research papers’ medical language, the language of hepatitis research papers, the language of hepatitis C research

Chapter 4. Corpus work, ESP and language learners

papers and the like. Biber (1993: 245) suggests a simple grid for designing corpora according to some pre-specified purpose. This grid includes considerations of textual features such as channel (written, spoken or scripted), format (published/not published, setting (institutional/other public/privatepersonal), addressee (how many, other or self, present or absent, degree of interactiveness, degree of shared knowledge), addressor (sex, age, occupation, acknowledged individual/institution), factuality (factual-informational, imaginative, etc.), purposes (persuade, entertain, edify; inform, instruct, explain, narrate, describe, keep records, reveal self, express attitudes, opinions or emotions, enhance interpersonal relationship) and topics. A specialized corpus of academic language should probably consider written and spoken language, published, institutional, a plurality of addressees either present and absent, both in interactive and non interactive settings, and with a minimum specialized shared knowledge; addressors should probably represent both sexes, and the topics’ should range over various academic disciplines. A specialized corpus of research articles about hepatitis C should more simply collect a number of articles dealing with a single topic (hepatitis C), by different authors acknowledged as experts in the field and possibly of both sexes. So while these corpora are both specialized samples of academic language, the latter is much more “specialized” and restricted than the former. At the same time, the category “specialized corpora” does not coincide with more traditional ESP categories. For instance, Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998) use categories such as EAP (English for academic purposes) or EBP (English for business purposes) or EMP (English for medical purposes), alluding to the world of language and language interaction that may be relevant to communicate in an academic business or medical environment. Specialised corpora simply contain texts and while such corpora of texts may provide a crucial contribution in both describing and teaching and learning EAP, EBP, EMP and the like, they constitute only instruments for achieving descriptive or pedagogic goals in ESP. They do not constitute the whole of academic language, business language or medical language. While specialized corpora may be conceived or constructed to represent a category such as Academic English (and the Micase corpus provides an example of academic spoken English), most often, specialized corpora represent a much more restricted portion of specialised texts (e.g. biology lectures, medical research papers). Specialized corpora, indeed corpora in general, do not only reflect the aim of representing a sub-language (very restricted or less so), they also reflect the research or teaching purpose they were produced for. The Micase corpus, for instance, is a specialized corpus of academic spoken English containing class-

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

room events such as lectures or discussion sessions and non classroom events such as advising sessions, interviews or meetings. The corpus was designed and made available with the purpose of studying characteristics of contemporary academic speech. Many specialized corpora are instead created for teaching rather than for research purposes and, being constructed for very ad hoc purposes, they are generally more restricted in the variety of texts they contain. Several studies in specialised corpus work quote corpora made for such ad hoc teaching purposes. Flowerdew (1993a; see Section 2.2.1), for instance, uses a corpus of 100,000 words containing transcriptions of lectures and texts dealing with biology. These are those (and only those) lectures and texts students have to deal with in their biology course. Similarly, Gledhill (1995, 2000) uses a 500,000 word corpus of medical papers about cancer as his teaching setting involves students who are researchers in the field of cancer therapy, while Beeching uses a 40-minute transcription of talk recorded at a horticultural station which was felt “to be most ‘central’ to students’ concern” (1997: 379, and see also Tribble 2001). In all of these cases, then, the design and construction of corpora took into consideration criteria which were based on teaching rather than descriptive purposes, that is to say, the main aim was not to represent the ESP domain (biology, medicine, horticulture), but rather to sample which was considered of central concern to the students’ needs, and the two do not always coincide. As mentioned in the introduction, specialised corpora used in the activities described in this book are of the latter type. From a teaching perspective, this has a series of advantages. An obvious one is that corpora designed in this way are highly “controlled” both in quantitative and qualitative terms. From the quantitative point of view, all of the corpora used here contain less than a million words. Such a restricted quantity of words is easily manageable from both a technical and an analytical point of view and work with such corpora will probably prevent students being overwhelmed by too much material (see ch.1). From the qualitative point of view, such corpora show characteristics of language which are probably of immediate concern to students and which they may see as relevant ones; this gives teachers the opportunity to focus on a limited number of items ad hoc for the teaching setting. On the other hand, such corpora have some obvious notable limits. These are of a descriptive as well as of a teaching nature. From a descriptive point of view, such corpora are not large enough to say to what extent features which emerge as very frequent are in fact characterizing features of the specialised language under study and/or are generalizable inside (or beyond) the ESP field. From a teaching point of view, what is considered of central concern to the stu-

Chapter 4. Corpus work, ESP and language learners

dents’ needs by teachers does not always coincide with what emerges as actual learning needs in the teaching/learning environment. So while corpora designed for teaching purposes may cover some learners’ questions, they may not contain enough material to cover all of them and more material (and perhaps of a different type) will probably be necessary. This leads me to my next point, the continuum that links up specialized and general corpora, constructed with either teaching or descriptive aims.

. The continuum between specialized and general corpora .. Register variation across genres As mentioned above, it seems now to be generally acknowledged that specialized corpora “capture” local characteristics of language such as features of genre or register better that general corpora. This is due to a consideration of a quantitative nature. Specialized corpora in fact often provide more occurrences of “specialized” words than large corpora do. For instance the word “transaminase” occurs 61 times in a small corpus of research articles dealing with hepatitis and 17 in the BNC (all in one text). However, although they provide more instances of technical words or expressions, specialised corpora alone cannot tell us whether that word or expression in fact characterizes the language represented in the corpus (see Aston 1997b). The reason why this is so is that a genre or a register and general language are not discrete categories. Even though we collect a huge number of texts representing a genre, frequent characteristics emerging from the analysis of such a corpus may not be characteristic features of that genre: they may well be features related to a “hyper-genre” containing the genre we are examining or to the language in general. In order to be able to “see” what characterises a corpus containing texts belonging to a genre or a register, it is necessary to compare frequent features derived from that corpus with frequent features of other registers or genres and with those of the language in general. Biber (1988, Biber & Finegan 1993; Biber et al. 1998) argues that comparison of data from different types of corpora is necessary to be able to say whether a feature is typical of a corpus or not: Register analyses require a comparative approach: we need a baseline for comparison to know whether the use of a linguistic feature in a register is rare or common. (Biber et al. 1998: 136–7)

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

Biber et al. (1998) suggest that characteristics of register varieties represented in a large, general corpus can emerge by a comparison of the occurrences of particular features in particular texts and in the whole corpus. In other words, there are linguistic features which tend to appear significantly more or less frequently than the average in particular text-types. Groups of such features frequently found together in particular text-types are considered to be characteristic of those text-types. For example, linguistic features such as contractions (e.g. “ve”, “ll”), false starts (e.g. “okay”, “so we need to put –“, “I’m confused now”) and generalised content words (e.g. “thing”) tend to co-occur in conversation. Biber et al. suggest that ”linguistic features co-occur in texts because they function in similar ways” (1998: 147), that is to say, in the example of conversation, contractions, false starts and the use of general content words are all related to the constraints of real-time production, thus their co-occurrence provides indication of real-time produced-discourse (Biber et al. 1999: 10–11). On the basis of the co-occurrence of linguistic features it is possible to define “dimensions of variation”. For instance, a dimension can be given by a set of co-occurring features such as nouns, long words, prepositional phrases and attributive adjectives. A dimension can then be attributed a function: thus nouns, long words, prepositional phrases etc. are co-occurring features of texts with an informational focus. Looking at which features co-occur in the various text-types, it is then possible to draw a line going from e.g. maximally informative production (texts sharing features such as nouns, prepositional phrases, long words, etc.) to maximally involved production (texts sharing features such as contractions, present tense verbs, private verbs like “feel” or “think”, etc; see Biber et al. 1998: 145–152). According to the features they share, registers can be put on a line indicating the dimension. For instance, for the dimension “involved vs. informational production”, we can see that registers such as telephone conversations or face-to-face conversation have scores which place them in the direction of involved production, while academic prose has scores which place it more in the direction of informational production. The interesting fact emerging from Biber’s work is that registers can be placed on each dimension in a continuum. So while the extremes (very involved = conversation; very informational = academic prose) may sound obvious, there are much more interesting intermediate cases: for instance, personal letters score as less involved than conversation while prepared speeches are more involved than general fiction. The analysis can then help to characterize more specific registers. For instance, inside academic prose, a distinction can be drawn between history research articles and ecology research articles, the former being more narrative than the latter and in fact quite similar in scores to

Chapter 4. Corpus work, ESP and language learners

face-to-face conversation. While research articles as a whole score rather high along the line of the impersonal style dimension, it is possible to distinguish between the various sections, those which are more impersonal (methods and discussion) and those which are less (results, introduction), and unexpectedly we can see that the discussion, not the methods, is the most impersonal section, on the basis of this analysis (see Biber et al. 1998: 167). Biber’s scores are attributed on purely statistical and computational methods and, in this sense, they constitute data to be examined in the characterisation of registers rather than results to be used as characteristics of registers. What is interesting, however, in Biber’s study is that placing the various registers on a continuum line permits us to look at them in relationship to each other rather than as separate entities. Thus while academic prose and telephone conversations are seen as rather different registers along the dimension of “involved vs. informational production”, they are much nearer along the “dimension of narrative vs. non-narrative discourse”. What Biber shows then is that registers can be better characterized against a “normal” distribution of linguistic characteristics provided by a general corpus and that “a register” and “the whole” are units with very hazy borders and that they tend to merge into one another. What Biber (1998) suggests then is that comparison is crucial to interpret specificity and that characteristic features of registers emerge when a sub-corpus representing such registers are compared to some reference material, in this case the whole corpus, which is treated here as a reference corpus. .. Identifying specificity While Biber’s studies focus on register variation inside a large corpus of English language and, in this respect, he looks at the continuum between sub-corpora and the whole, rather than specialized and general corpora, the principle that features of a specialized corpus can be better characterized against a normal distribution of linguistic characteristics provided by a large corpus seems to hold even when the specialized corpus is not part of the general one (see Biber et al. 1998: Ch. 6). The importance of interpreting data from a specialized sample against the background of comparative data from a more general one is well argued by Stubbs (1993, 1994, 1996). Stubbs’ “specialized” samples are in fact not corpora such as those we have been dealing with so far, but single long specialized texts (books). He compares uses of language in such long texts with that emerging from large and varied corpora. His research is directed at seeing ways in which texts encode ideological positions, by particular language uses.

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

The following, deals with the analysis of two geography schoolbooks, one general, the other overtly environmentalist in purpose. Stubbs focuses on ergative verbs, i.e. those verbs which can be found in either the transitive, intransitive or passive form. One such verb, as exemplified by Stubbs (1994: 205) is “close”: several firms have closed their factories (transitive) factories have been closed (passive) factories have closed (intransitive)

He argues that insofar as these verbs can be constructed in various ways they may play a key role in the attribution of agency and may thus be used to attach (or not attach) responsibility to subjects. The purpose of his analysis is to see whether ergative verbs are used in the environmentalist schoolbook to attach responsibility to subjects. He finds that in this work, ergative verbs are constructed in the transitive form much more frequently than in the general book (52% vs 23%) and that this proportion is reversed for intransitive forms (38% in the environmentalist book, 51% in the general book). This data suggest that the transitive construction of ergative verbs may not be casual in the environmentalist book and may suggest that ergative verbs are constructed in such a way as to attach responsibility to subjects. Comparing the data above with figures derived from a larger corpus containing a variety of written texts (the Lob corpus), however, Stubbs derives a rather different picture. The use of ergatives in the Lob is in fact found to be rather similar to that in the environmentalist book, totaling 49% ergative verbs used in the transitive and 31% in the intransitive form. Stubbs (1994) suggests that this leads the analyst to reinterpret the difference between the two schoolbooks: if the use of ergative verbs in the environmentalist book is similar to that in general writing, then it is not the environmentalist book which makes larger use of transitive forms, rather the general book which makes larger use of intransitive forms. Stubbs (1994) highlights very clearly that the data from the Lob are fundamental here in interpreting the specificities of the two texts: 1. the general geography book differs from a corpus of general writing and is characterized by a larger use of intransitive ergative verbal forms, 2. the environmentalist geography book is different from the general book, but similar to a corpus of general writing in the use of transitive vs. intransitive ergative verb forms. This also leads to further questions, such as whether the use of ergative verbs in the general geography schoolbook is specific to this particular book or whether the difference between the general and the environmentalist books

Chapter 4. Corpus work, ESP and language learners

are interpretable in terms of a (deliberate?) deviance of the latter from the conventional use within the genre of geography schoolbook writing. However, for our purposes here, the analysis reported above makes it clear that comparison with a general corpus like the Lob (Stubbs 1994) or the Cobuild (Stubbs 1996) allows the analyst to interpret occurrence of data in single texts in relation to occurrence of data in a variety of texts and provides a parameter against which to check specific usages in small corpora like those made up by these two geography books. So the suggestion we can derive from Stubbs (1994) as well as from Biber et al. (1998) is that comparison of a specialized corpus with a general reference corpus helps understanding and interpreting specificity.

. Specialized language corpora and language learning At the beginning of this chapter, I observed that pioneering experiments using corpora in language teaching consistently underlined that corpus work tends to favour an explorative investigative approach on the part of the students. I then noted that although such teaching/learning issues sounded interesting from an applied perspective, they were temporarily put aside as corpus studies tended to focus on topics which seemed to be more urgent as they regarded problems which were undermining the actual reliability of corpora as instruments for research as well as for teaching and learning. Such topics had to do with defining clearer criteria for corpus design and representativeness and brought about a profound change in the nature of the corpora which were at the disposal of researchers and teachers and learners. In particular, a new dichotomy was created between specialized and general corpora and new methods of analysis were suggested which considered comparisons between corpora as constitutive of corpus work. The increasing availability of large general corpora like the BNC and the Cobuild Direct made it possible to compare features of specialized corpora restricted in text-types and domains with “normal” distribution of language characteristics. It is evident that what is available to teachers and learners now is rather different if we compare it to what was available at the beginning of the nineties. Now, the question I pose here is whether in this new situation, with more reliable instruments and more efficient methods, we can actually get back to issues of a more explicit teaching and learning nature. Or, in other words, can corpus work, now, be even more interesting for (ESP) teachers and learners? In a 1998 paper written in honour of John Swales and Ann Johns, Widdowson (1998b) discusses some issues involved in ESP learning. He develops

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

his argument in three main points. The first has to do with lexical competence. One of the defining characteristics of a discourse community according to Swales (1990: 26) is that “a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis”. Such specific lexis then has to be acquired by would-be members, such as ESP students. Indeed, it is not just a matter of knowing the semantic meanings of the words as the words are “schematically connected to form conceptualizations of reality which define the culture of a particular discourse community” (1998b: 7). What outsiders lack is the insiders’ experience of a whole new way of conceptualizing things and talking about them. Quoting a poem by Craig Raine, Widdowson compares the status of the outsider to that of a Martian observing a telephone. From the Martian’s point a view, a telephone is an apparatus that snores if you pick it up and is woken up by tickling it with a finger. It does not help the Martian to know that the apparatus he encounters is called a telephone, what s/he needs is the conceptual framework, the culturally determined ideational and interpersonal schemata. Widdowson’s second point has to do with genre. A further defining characteristic of a discourse community according to Swales is that a “discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims”. “Possessing” genres, however, does not simply mean looking at structural characteristics or exposing students to genuine texts, it means introducing students to knowledge of belief, values, conventions of behaviour which characterize discourse communities. “Genre analysis is, therefore, not principally about the English of Engineering, of Medicine, of Business or Banking, but about the conventions of thought and communication which define these areas of professional activity, and how, incidentally, these are given expression, or textualised, in English” (Widdowson 1998b: 9). The third point has to do with discourse authenticity. Genres show typical features of language use in certain domains. They are abstracted out of actual occurrences by the expertise of discourse analysts. If students of English for such domains are to learn such generic structures as points of reference, they must also be able to abstract from actual linguistic data. If you simply expose them to the actual data in the form of authentic texts, you give them no guidance as to how to do this. The crucial pedagogic question is, instead, how to guide students to an authentication of actually occurring language by a process of gradual initiation into the conventions of communication accepted in the discourse community for which they are bidding for membership. As shown above, specialised corpora are simply collections of texts, naturally produced, and selected according to some common features (regarding genre and topic). They are limited in that from a descriptive point of view they

Chapter 4. Corpus work, ESP and language learners

do not represent a language domain (for which comparison with different or general corpora is necessary) and from a pedagogic point of view they simply provide actual data in the form of genuine texts. As mentioned in the previous chapters, concordances highlight recurrent usage of words and phrases. In the case of specialized corpora, concordances provide a way to look at typical (or atypical), conventional (or non-conventional) usage of lexis and textual or genre structures or, in other words, they provide a way to look at how language is used “idiomatically” inside specialized texts. Pedagogically speaking, corpus work is interesting not only insofar as it provides texts, but also insofar as it provides a methodology to investigate these texts. Concordances derived from corpora provide uninterpreted material which needs to be given a sense. The attempt to give a sense to the data provokes what Widdowson (1998a: 713) calls a “pragmatic reaction” by the analysts who examine their data to see if it answers their questions. So the limit of producing uninterpreted material is what makes concordance material interesting. Likewise, specialised corpora provide material which is hardly generalizable and comparison with material derived from other types of corpora (e.g. general ones) is necessary. The necessity to compare the material, again, produces an investigative approach that is exactly what makes the work interesting.

. Conclusion While language teaching studies have concentrated on corpora and concordances as products (placing major emphasis on corpus representativeness and on the generalizability of the results of corpus analysis), they have overlooked the potential which was entailed in corpus work methodology. Investigations involved in identifying the conventions which determine features of genre and shape concepts in specialized text corpora may provide learners with a way to see “how words are schematically connected to form conceptualizations of reality which define the culture of a discourse community” (Widdowson 1998b: 7) and to interact with such specialized text in an authentic communicative process by which they become gradually initiated in the conventions of the discourse community they are interested in. In this chapter I have focused on some conventions related to lexis and genre which seem to be fruitfully explored with corpus tools and I have dealt with some problems in corpus-work methodology for analyzing specialised language. In the next chapters I illustrate and discuss issues about introduc-

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

ing learners to the actual methodology of corpus work (Chapter 5) and present a number of searches carried out by students as well as the approach they take in investigating corpora for ESP learning (Chapter 6).

Note . Robinson (1991) observes that as ESP is often inspired by needs which are hardly generalizable, many ESP teachers are also researchers, in that they have to provide descriptions of the specialised language they are concerned with, and material and curriculum designers. Acknowledging the multiple roles ESP researchers often cover, Robinson (1991: 1) proposes to call them “practitioners”. In her own words: “ESP practitioners need training in ways of describing language, training in teaching language and training in designing language courses. In addition, and unlike those involved in EGP (English for general purposes), they need some knowledge of, or at least access to information on, whatever it is that students are professionally involved with, for example economics, physics, nursing, catering”.

Chapter 5

Guiding the learners to work with corpora and corpus data

. Introduction The main instrument of corpus analysis is the concordancer. Guiding students to use a concordancer, however, does not merely involve familiarizing them with technical issues such as generating concordances and sorting the lines out. These are quite easy operations and, in most cases, they pose little problem to any computer-literate student. Like any other software, the concordancer is just a tool. As a computer tool, it simply improves data by generating and classifying it more quickly and in an error-free fashion. The crucial problem in a language learning perspective, then, does not have to do with operating the tool technically, but rather with getting appropriate data and carrying out correct interpretations of it. In other words, the main issue consists in enabling students to ask appropriate questions and to “read” and interpret the data to get sensible answers. Processing a corpus of authentic texts, in this way, involves a range of levels of linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge, which can enable students to categorize occurrences, identify regularities and generalize from them. In this respect, students need to be guided in corpus work, at least at the initial stages. Such guidance, as I shall discuss it here, has the function of introducing learners to interpret corpus materials and the main aim to promote students’ participation in corpus work. It seems to me that there are at least three problems to be taken into consideration in guiding students to interpreting corpus data: first, the students need to be made familiar with the type of material a concordance provides, in particular the fact that it shows genuine occurrences from texts rather than preselected examples; second, “what to look for” in a concordance and the type of information it provides; third, the relationship between the occurrences provided in the concordance material and the corpus they derive from. In this chapter, I shall deal with these three issues and suggest some tasks to guide the students through them. These tasks simply provide examples and many

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

more can be thought of and constructed on the basis of the problems discussed here. A series of tasks and examples to gradually introduce novitiate analysts to “read” corpus data is provided by Sinclair (2003). While these are not constructed specifically for the classroom context and involve a larger audience, they provide a rich and useful source of suggestions.

. Type of material: Samples vs. examples Although it permits us to deal with actual occurrences of language, a corpus is not “the real language”. Large as it may be, and even when selected in order to be as representative of a language, or a language variety, as possible, a corpus does not include all the possible occurrences of language and inevitably includes patterns which might not be recurrent at all and which might sound odd to a native speaker (Edwards 1993). When we look for information about a pattern of language through the concordancer we get only the collocations in which the search word appears in the corpus. This makes concordances a very different type of material from those traditionally used in the classroom. Unlike dictionaries, grammars and textbooks, a concordance does not offer explanations; as noted above (Section 2.3 in particular), it merely provides data which it is the user’s task or responsibility to explain. Inductive work is not new in language pedagogy: the practices of many teachers and materials writers involve presenting a series of similar instances to help learners induce generalizations. Analysing a concordance, however, is not necessarily the same thing as analysing five or six sentences on the blackboard or in a textbook. Elsewhere (Gavioli 2001: 110–112), I have argued that one should at least consider the following differences: 1. A concordance may contain many more instances. A search for the words “deal/deals” in a 200,000-word corpus of business newspaper articles (MCA corpus, business section) found 222 occurrences – hardly a number for learners to manage rapidly. 2. A concordance will often show more than one pattern of use. In the case just mentioned, occurrences of “deal/deals” provides verb as well as noun forms. In order to focus on nouns, careful reading and manual categorization of the concordance lines was required to exclude the (admittedly limited number of) 11 occurrences of the verb “deal”, as well as 6 instances of the fixed phrase “a good/great deal of ”.

Chapter 5. Guiding the learners to work with corpora and corpus data

3. Even when a concordance provides instances of only one pattern of use, considerable analysis may still be necessary to identify this. A concordance of “comply with” (and its forms “complied”, “complying”, etc.) was generated to check whether this verb is used only with animate subjects, following the teacher’s intuitive explanation. While this is basically true (but see more on this below, 5.2), a somewhat lengthy reading of the extended context and classification of the examples was necessary to confirm the hypothesis. In order to clarify what is involved in interpreting corpus data, it is useful to make a conceptual distinction between samples and examples. The instances which teachers write on the blackboard and which materials writers include in textbooks are generally chosen to illustrate some abstract formal or functional feature – the meaning of a word, a rule of grammar, or a convention of use. All that is necessarily shared by the instances in a concordance, on the other hand, is a common orthographic form – the sequence of characters we have asked the computer to find. The blackboard and textbook provide examples, in the sense that they are intended to exemplify a particular linguistic feature. The concordance, by contrast, provides samples, selected for the sole reason that they contain a particular combination of characters. While samples can of course be used as a source of examples, this transformation requires human intervention via analysis and selection. Even the texts in textbooks, authentic or otherwise, can generally be seen as examples which have been chosen to illustrate particular features of language in use (and to exclude features thought likely to be difficult or distracting). The texts constituting corpora, on the other hand, are generally included to provide samples of particular text-types, without any prior analysis of their linguistic characteristics (Atkins et al. 1992). Whether sentences or texts, examples are thus likely to suggest certain generalizations quite explicitly and unambiguously (see Cook 2001); samples, on the other hand, merely provide occurrences of varying tractability from which possible generalizations have to be worked out. If learners treat corpus data as examples rather than samples, and assume that these will coherently illustrate a generalized principle of the type they are accustomed to find provided by teachers and textbooks, they are likely to misunderstand and misuse the data in question.

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

.. Task 1: Looking at the concordance lines as samples It is a common experience that those who use a concordancer for the first time to check the meaning of a word or a pattern of words, find that many of the examples occurring in the list of concordances are not very illuminating. Concordance-derived data may not provide immediate evidence for the question posed and as Sinclair notes (1991: 99) “the most actual examples are unrepresentative of the pattern of the word or the phrase for which they are chosen”. It is likely, then, that the different nature of sample occurrences will be evident to the students in virtually any concordance sheet. For initial stages, then, it may be useful to provide tasks that simply focus on the discussion of this issue. Below, we can see a concordance of the words “asset/assets” generated from a corpus of speeches on marketing and business management (220,000 words). The meaning of this word may not be familiar to the students (in Italian it is also a false friend of the word “assetto”, meaning “structure”, “organization”) and it cannot easily be deduced from the concordance lines. The concordance has been reduced to half of the items found (randomly selected deleting one on two lines) to restrict the amount of material to propose to the students. The concordance can be introduced to students by telling them what it actually is, i.e. a number of lines from authentic texts about marketing, including the word “asset”, singular or plural. The students could then be asked to compare these lines to the examples they are normally presented with in the classroom. Students may notice that the lines do not provide complete sentences and that some of them are not comprehensible. The possible presence of typos may also be made evident to them (“requirment” in l. 5 and “betweenminorities” written as a single word in l. 9). Attention may also be brought on l. 3 where “asset” appears as a proper noun as part of a brand name. After this preliminary encounter, students can then be guided to actually “read” the concordance. In this respect, it is useful for them to know that they do not have to read the entire lines, but simply scroll across the search word, looking, for instance, for adjectives and verbs preceding it. In the concordance of “asset/s” they may notice occurrences of adjectives in “financial asset” (l. 6), “future asset” (l. 7), “marketing assets” (l. 11), “valuable national assets” (l. 12), “physical assets” (l. 18) (as well as “divested assets” (ll. 4-5) which may initiate a new query for “divest”), and occurrences of verbs in “trading assets” (l. 1), “rationalize assets” (l. 22), “grow the assets” (l. 24), “selling the assets” (l. 25). An outline of the task, in two parts, is provided below.

Chapter 5. Guiding the learners to work with corpora and corpus data

Task 1: Introducing learners to concordance material – first part Below, you can see a list of lines containing the word “asset”, singular and plural. These lines were automatically selected by a computer searching a collection of texts dealing with marketing and business management. They probably look different from the examples you are used to looking at. In what respect are they different? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

sed of lots of markets, each market trading an lacks tend to be smaller (whether measured by Meade Instruments’ Purchase of All, or Certain of the buyer; and (3) many buyers of divested rm locate an ”up-front buyer” for the divested ket trading an asset, in this case a financial hrough this process to perhaps create a future e products, and certain natural gas gathering No doubt, a large part of the differences in ties, like purchasing decision making or like divest two refineries and related marketing ery remains one of our most valuable national ise of online intermediaries. But the cost of A consent agreement requiring divestiture of opening multiple accounts. Such spreading of one side of the transaction to have sales or ncial operating balance sheet - a list of our cases. In the past, divestitures of physical competitive. The acquisition of gas pipeline to look at some of our long standing presumed ount of opportunity there to help rationalize e funded, serviced, and traded as securitized self-defeating in the sense that f companies are there to protect and grow the Then there is realising, i.e. selling the always given to investors to diversify their mercial banks in the United States with total der is: a brand is a valuable

asset, in this case a financial asset. Now, wha assets, sales, or employment), newer, and mo Assets, of Tasco Holdings, Inc.’s Celestron Int assets do not have access to sufficient inform assets. I believe that this requirment has bee asset. Now, what you have in the financial mar asset? Let me take some time here to give y assets. (39) Food - The food industry is of ob asset holdings betweenminorities and other fa asset management, is for proliferation to speci assets, terminal facilities for light petroleum an assets, and one that we can certainly all be pr asset carrying, the cost of inventory carrying is assets and licensing of intellectual property rig asset holdings is perfectly consistent with the assets in excess of $100 million and the other assets and liabilities - and analyze each one a assets in areas of competitive overlap have be assets by an electric generating company or a assets and ask the question whether in the fut assets. You know, it was interesting, when w assets in national markets. But the evidence assets have been sent abroad and n assets of their companies. Can any Board ma asset. Brands like Bombay Sapphire which ge assets-be they stocks, bonds, mutual funds, assets under $100 million (in 1994 dollars) fell asset Certainly if you get everything right

Concordance 4. “asset/assets” in the marketing speeches corpus (220,000 words), left sorted (extract)

While the students may understand, at this point, that an “asset” has to do with something of value, the actual meaning of this word may not be clear enough from the concordance lines and comparison with a dictionary entry may be very useful. In the second part of Task 1, below, students are guided to note that the information provided in the concordance is different from both the information and the examples provided in dictionary entries (see steps 2 and 3): Task 1 – second part While looking at concordance data like those shown above, you do not need to read the full lines: in fact you probably need to skip many, as they are not comprehensible or do not illustrate the word you are looking for. In l. 3, for instance, “Certain Assets” is a brand proper name. 1.

Read the concordance vertically, following the search word column and the word to the left of it. Underline the words to the left of “asset/s” in the text.

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

Do these words give you an idea of what “asset/s” are? Discuss your idea with your colleagues and teacher. The following are the definitions of “asset/s” provided in the Cobuild Dictionary, are they helpful in clarifying the meaning of this word? a. Something or someone that is an asset is considered useful or helps a person or organization to be successful. b. The assets of a company or a person are all the things that they own. On the basis of the dictionary explanation, look at the concordance again and identify examples illustrating meaning a. or b. Insert “a” or “b” next to the lines you selected. Look at the examples provided by the Cobuild Dictionary for meaning a. and b. of “asset/s”; do they illustrate the two meanings clearly? a. Her leadership qualities were the greatest asset of the Conservative Party b. By the end of 1989 the group had assets of 3.5 billion francs Select some examples in the concordance of “asset/s” which you think illustrate either meaning a. or meaning b. clearly. You can widen the text of each line to get more context. Which meaning is more frequent in the concordance of “asset/s”, a or b.? Why, do you think?

In steps 4 and 5 in Task 1 above, students are guided to compare the material provided in the concordance with that provided in the dictionary, looking at both the definition and the examples. The purpose is to make it clear to the students that a concordance, unlike dictionary entries, does not provide a ready-made explanation and the concordance lines may not be “good examples”, though some of them could. The purpose of the task, though, is also to show the students that using a dictionary and a concordance jointly may be helpful to get a better idea of the search word’s meaning and usage and, in the case above, to get more examples of the more specialized meaning of the word (meaning b.) which is generally used in business (but see more on this in 6.4, below).

. “What to look for” in a concordance: Recurrence and typicality Since we cannot assume that a single generalization will necessarily account for all the data, analyzing a concordance involves looking for linguistic features which recur in at least some instances in the sample provided. As shown in Section 3.3.2, recurrent features may be of many kinds. We may find recurrent word combinations, or collocations, such as “deal” preceded by “a good/great”, in the following extract from a concordance of “deal/deals” (ll. 60–65):

Chapter 5. Guiding the learners to work with corpora and corpus data

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Standard in 150m pound German rallying point for investors opposed to a GM ng to do with the toll. At œ55, it is a good ee one eighth per cent (and that on a good rs or French francs, where rates are a good the telephones can be built to need a great ing in projects on time, and there is a great machina of North Sea oil. A very great 891010 View from City Road: ICI ers had expected that the fees for the Italy

deal By PATRICK HOSKING deal, among them New York arbitrageurs w deal more expensive than a ticket on the hi deal) once discounts had been allowed to deal lower.” Interest cover is eight times. deal less power. This in turn makes them c deal of faith in the Eurodisney managemen deal hangs, of course, on the difference bet deal makes strategic sense deal would be the standard 0.325 per cent.

Concordance 5. Extract of “deal” in the MCA corpus (Murison-Bowie 1993b)

Or we may find recurrent syntactic categories, as is the case of the verb “stare” in the following concordance (from MCA corpus), which is systematically followed by a preposition or adverb (“at”, “down”, “out”): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

once you have ‘got it” you are left al are wholly redundant when you gle-perspective Hitchens, has you of their way to move close in and standably shocked to find himself lladium: there are that many eyes e-up, three South London women

staring at an object that has engi stare at this subtopian, A-road ar staring down a murky, tree-lined stare down at anyone writing. staring down from a billboard adve staring out at you. All four ra stared transfixed at a Spanish da

Concordance 6. “star*” in the MCA corpus (Murison-Bowie 1993b)

Looking for recurrences generally involves looking for other lines which are in some way similar in form or meaning, in order to see if they can be fitted into the same or a similar category. Recurrent features may be more or less evident. The collocation “a good/great deal” and the colligation of the verb“stare” with a preposition are clear enough in the concordance data above. Yet, even when they are clear it may not be easy to get students to “see” recurrences, and, as noticed in 3.1, they tend to search for “the rule they know”. It seems sensible then, at initial stages, to ask them to look at easier (possibly teacher-edited) materials and discuss their interpretations with them - which is also a worthwhile language task. Most analyses may require more time and effort than those shown above. For instance, after noting that students mis-used the verb “comply with”, a concordance was generated (see Concordance 7 below) to help learners investigate what was wrong in their understanding of the meaning of this verb. Here, there is no recurrent (lexical or syntactic) word form preceding or following forms of “comply with”. Following the teacher’s intuitive explanation that the verb “comply with” is generally used with animate subjects, students first looked at which subjects were used. In lines 2 and 3 these are clearly persons (“practition-

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

suitable sites or have not thorised practitioners who ossible for the husband to Austria in May 1945 was to f Agriculture, ‘failing to ) ICR 371.

In order to ‘an assurance that it will represented class without

complied with the ruling.

Recently residents of s complied with a statutory code of conduct to charge f comply with or would cripple his business.

On joi comply with the Yalta agreement ordering repatriation comply with natural justice”.

Until yesterday mor comply with Community law, it was now necessary to ag comply with its obligations in relation to the use of complying with the requirements of the county court r

Concordance 7. “compl*” + “with” in the MCA corpus (Murison-Bowie 1993b)

ers” and “the husband”), but in the remaining lines the context is too restricted to deduce the subject exactly. It was then necessary to look at wider contexts to see that in several of these other cases the subjects are authorities or organizations – “many authorities” (1), “the Minister of Agriculture” (5), and “Deloitte US” (a branch of a multinational firm: 7). In other cases, the construction is impersonal, but a person or organization is still the implied subject – “the British Army” (4), “a named representative defendant” (8), and, we may guess, some governmental authority in (6) 1.

But many authorities have either not been able to find suitable sites or have not complied with the ruling.

5.

The nuns’ request for a judicial review of the order to slaughter the flock had been based upon John Gummer, the Minister of Agriculture, ‘failing to comply with natural justice”.

4.

But the Cossacks had been fighting for the Germans and the British Army’s main concern in Austria in May 1945 was to comply with the Yalta agreement ordering repatriation

6.

In order to comply with Community law, it was now necessary to agree the same date of retirement for both sexes.

7.

John Bullock, senior partner of Deloitte (UK), said: ‘We have been unable to gain satisfactory assurances from Touche Ross.” Neither had Deloitte US given ‘an assurance that it will comply with its obligations in relation to the use of the name”

8.

There was no reason to suppose that in proceedings under Order 5, rule 5, it was intended to enable a named representative defendant to claim against a member of the represented class without complying with the requirements of the county court rules.

Analysis of the “comply with” concordance, then, required classifying subjects (explicit or implicit) as persons (“husband”, “practitioner”), authorities (“the

Chapter 5. Guiding the learners to work with corpora and corpus data

Minister of Agriculture”), and companies (“Deloitte US”) and subsequently ascribing them to the single more general category of “people and organizations”, which partially coincided with, and partially augmented the teacher’s intuitive explanation. Looking at the words following forms of “comply with”, then, the students noted that the “statutory Code” (l. 2), “the Yalta agreement” (l. 4) and “the Community law” (l. 6) were all sets of laws and then also that “ruling” (l. 1), “obligations” (l. 7) and “requirements” (l. 8) could be interpreted as “rules” the subjects had to “comply with”. Reading the extended contexts of the remaining lines confirmed that “the husband” in l. 2 also had to comply with some ruling, and “natural justice” (l. 5) could also be interpreted as “the rules of natural justice”: 2.

The judge considered this aspect very carefully. There was no suggestion that this order would be impossible for the husband to comply with or would cripple his business. On joint assets of £4m he would retain £2.7m or so. The award was not excessively generous.

5.

The nuns’ request for a judicial review of the order to slaughter the flock had been based upon John Gummer, the Minister of Agriculture, ‘failing to comply with natural justice”. Until yesterday morning, the Ministry had not given the nuns any information on the tests they had made or what.

So while these concordance lines did share common features, such features were less evident and more effort as well as specific skills were required. This time, students had to think in terms of common semantic features, rather than lexical or syntactic ones, which may be less obvious or more hidden. Learners brought up on input filtered by the teacher and textbook are unlikely to be familiar with the processes of classification and generalization involved in making sense of concordance lines and need to be made aware of the types of things (recurrent words, syntactic/semantic classes) they may want to look for in the data. .. Task 2: Focusing the students’ attention on recurrent patterns Most concordances are “read” by looking at what is recurrent and repetitive on either side of the search word, so presumably any concordance is suitable for this task. Particularly in corpora of specialised texts, top frequent words are often those which make the role of recurrence immediately visible. Very frequent words in specialised corpora in fact often tend to aggregate in recurrent chunks to form more specialised meanings. A concordance of “market” (singular) in

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

a corpus of marketing research articles (550,000 words) provides 1025 occurrences, immediately revealing frequent combinations of “market”; witness for example: “market orientation” (over 100 occurrences), “established market economies” (16 occurrences), “perceptions of market (15 occ.), “market-based assets” (14 occ.). It can also be noticed that in most cases “market” is used as an adjective rather than a noun. While these “big groups” of similar occurrences are highly visible to the students, 1025 occurrences are not a number which can be analysed item by item. To help students perform analysis, when the lines are so many, it may be worthwhile to focus on a single group of instances.1 For example, the combination “a market” occurs 81 times, a large but manageable number. Students can be asked to sort the concordance on the right or on the left. In the case of “a market”, right sorting seems more effective to identify recurrent items (see concordance of “a market” in Appendix 3). On the right of “a market”, some recurrent words can easily be identified forming recurrent collocations such as: “a market economy” (7 occurrences), “a market orientation” (29 occurrences), and the chunk “a market-oriented” (12 occurrences). Such collocations can be easily identified by students. While an automatic clustering tool may also be used to extract them, it is probably helpful for the students, initially, to identify these recurrences “manually”, to accustom themselves to “reading” the concordance text. Once students have identified these larger groups of collocations, they can focus on one, more in particular. In this case, they can be asked to focus on “market-oriented” providing a limited number of occurrences (12) and some interesting features. Looking at this short concordance, right sorted (see concordance 8 below), students can see that very recurrent, evident groups of collocates are no longer visible, but the material is restricted enough to allow closer analysis. In ll. 7–9, for instance, they will notice the repetition of “firm”. This, together with “company” (l. 2) forms a group of 4 collocates which are similar in meaning. Other repetitions are that of “culture”, forming the chunk “market-oriented culture” (ll. 3–4) as well as “market-oriented business culture” (l. 1). Even “marketoriented policy” (l. 12) and “market-oriented fashion” (l. 6) can probably be seen here as very close in meaning to “market-oriented culture”: Looking at the extended context of this concordance (see Appendix 3), students can see that “market-oriented” is generally attributed to a firm or to the “business culture” of that firm. Looking more closely, being “market-oriented” seems to be a very positive attitude for a firm. The occurrences in fact systematically reveal the advantages of firms and cultures which are “market-oriented”. This is visible in the concordance above, in ll. 3 (“benefits”), 4 (“successful in-

Chapter 5. Guiding the learners to work with corpora and corpus data 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

to identifying the steps that fall between market sensing by the firm, a capability of he ability to communicate the benefits of . successful innovation is the product of w standards and values more consistent with rketing approach requires that firms act in based assets and other asset types. First, s, the competitor intelligence gathered by ng and sales costs enhance the cash flow of sets, justification for efforts to develop tput: it is the outcome of the creation of men’s advocate. This failure to implement

a a a a a a a a a a a a

market-oriented market-oriented market-oriented market-oriented market-oriented market-oriented market-oriented market-oriented market-oriented market-oriented market-oriented market-oriented

business culture and performance ou company (Day 1994). As a result it culture across functional areas with culture coupled with entrepreneurial economy.” In recent years, for exam fashion, i.e. understand what custom firm may uncover through its intelli firm can be used to improve the posit firm. This may be recognised in high organisation, and framework that can organisation. This makes for a virtu policy in midwifery can be explained

Concordance 8. “a market-oriented” in the marketing research articles corpus (550,000 words)

novation”), 9 (“sales costs enhance the cash flow of a market-oriented firm). More evidence is shown in the extended context (underlined; the search word is in bold face): 7.

t orientation influences the way in which a firm interacts with its customers. There is also a relationship between market-based assets and other asset types. First, a market-oriented firm may uncover through its intelligence about customers or a competitor that investment is required in a non-market asset to achieve or m

11. riguing for linking customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. The strategic marketing literature views value more as an output: it is the outcome of the creation of a market-oriented organisation. This makes for a virtuous circle, but the circle is often incomplete, since employees’ views are often less well-known than custo

Performing tasks and exercises such as the one shown above conducts students to gradually familiarize themselves with the types of features to look for in concordance data. These are shown as recurrent behaviour, either in the form of repetition of collocates (“market economy”, “market orientation”, “marketoriented”) or repetition of classes of collocates (“firm”, “company”), or repetition of types of contexts (e.g. the specification of advantages and benefits of market-oriented economy).

. Correlating output data and corpus texts In the sections above, I discussed the problem of training students to identify possibly “interesting” features in concordances. In corpus linguistics, these are generally shown through repetition. This, in its turn, highlights recur-

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

rent lexico-syntactic or pragmatic patterns which are associated with the search word. Simply looking at recurrence, though, may not be enough and, as seen in Chapter 4, concordance data need to be interpreted taking into account the corpus they actually come from. Some ideas for achieving this purpose with students can be derived from Section 4.3 above, where I pointed out that comparing corpora of specialized language and general corpora may suggest or highlight features of the specialized corpus, and more are provided in Section 6.3 below. Here, though, I suggest a task which seemed to me very useful to help students achieve awareness of correlations between a (specialised) corpus and the output it produces. I also describe a follow-up to this task, which eventually led the students to create their own (specialised) corpora. .. Task 3: Corpus data and corpus content The task I illustrate here was proposed to a group of students in my European studies university course to help them become familiar with the corpus of market research articles (a discussion of this task was included in a presentation by Comastri & Gavioli 2004). This corpus collects 70 papers from 5 major marketing journals. It was divided into 5 sub-corpora each containing papers from a single journal. Lists of keywords were then generated for each of the five corpora.2 A description of each journal’s scientific purposes and interests was then downloaded from the journals’ websites. Print-outs of the journals’ descriptions and the keywords were handed out to the students, who were asked to compare each list of keywords to the corresponding journal description (see Table 4, below, showing material from 1 out of the 5 sub-corpora; a more complete worksheet appears in Appendix 4). The frequency of many words in the lists can be easily accounted for in terms of the journal description. In the case of the European Journal of Marketing (see Table 4, below), for instance, the occurrence of the top keywords can probably be justified by the fact that the journal deals with several marketing topics (“marketing”, 1), includes comparative studies and studies in developing countries (“internationalisation”, 2), deals with product development (“brands”, 4, “brand”, 6, “branding”, 15) and distribution (“sales”, 5). On the basis of this comparison, students can be asked to generate concordances of those words which seem to be accounted for in the description and those which do not. This provides further material for discussion about the correlation between the corpus and its output.

Chapter 5. Guiding the learners to work with corpora and corpus data

Table 4. Description of European Journal of Marketing vs. corpus keywords JOURNAL DESCRIPTION: JOURNAL KEYWORD LIST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MARKETING 1. marketing 2. internationalisation Key Journal Audiences 3. training – Academics and corporate/education 4. brands libraries 5. sales – Senior and middle marketing 6. brand management 7. crm – Senior executives in distribution, 8. sponsorship market research and advertising 9. characteristics 10. pioneer Coverage 11. market – Comparative studies 12. corporate – Customer policy and service 13. orientation – Implications of import and export 14. customer legislation 15. branding – Marketing abstracts 16. critical – Marketing experiences 17. services – Marketing in developing countries 18. you – Marketing of services 19. behaviour – Marketing planning 20. cent – Product development 21. organisation – Social, cultural and economic effects of 22. customers marketing 23. planning 24. staff 25. com

26. supporters 27. football 28. system 29. midwives 30. gap 31. activities 32. retailers 33. per 34. quantitative 35. what 36. leveraging 37. theory 38. club 39. retail 40. program 41. campaign 42. figure 43. uk 44. balmer 45. satisfaction 46. consultant 47. polls 48. it 49. identity 50. fans

Tasks similar to this can be proposed using single texts (general or specialised) as corpora. In Gavioli (1997), I suggested a task where students were asked to use: a. the list of the most frequent words and b. the concordance of the most frequent noun occurring in a newspaper article, as clues to making hypotheses about the main news topic. They were also asked to use these clues and their hypotheses to write an article that was supposed to be most similar to the one that was “hidden” in the data. They then compared their article to the original one and both texts to the frequency list and the concordance data. Besides making it evident what type of link exists between the corpus and its output, this task also constituted an interesting kind of language exercise as well as an opportunity for observing text structures.

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

.. Follow-up of Task 3: Leading students to create corpora Working with the corpus of marketing research papers, students compared the keyword lists of the 5 sub-corpora. This made it increasingly evident to them that each sub-corpus was somewhat different from the others in terms of lexis and topics represented. For instance, while “brand/s” was a very frequent word in the sub-corpus of papers from the European Journal of Marketing, “environmental” was very frequent in the Journal of World Business while neither of the two was very frequent in other sub-corpora. This led them to think that searches need to be carried out on appropriate corpora and that, in the case of a fuzzy area such as marketing, one probably needs to have more than one corpus at hand to find occurrences of specialised items. The discussion that emerged from the comparison of keyword lists led the students to a better understanding of the type of material they were dealing with and gradually to understand whether it was actually useful for the type of language they wished to acquaint themselves with. Discussing the features of the sub-corpora, many students came to realise that this was not “what they meant by “the language of marketing” and that these corpora only contained some of the language information they wanted to grasp (for instance, information about the usage of “brand” and “corporate” was appreciated). Some, in particular, said that what they wanted to do was to be able to write texts which advertised products and services, present companies or discuss issues about trade in the EU. This eventually led to students’ collaboration in making up specialised corpora of texts they were interested in: a corpus of tourists’ guides, corpora collecting descriptions of museums, of public relations companies and of wines, a corpus of websites of companies offering banner and e-mail advertising, a corpus of texts about trade in the EU (Pearson 2000 provides some useful hints to guide students to choose texts for their corpora). All of these corpora were put in a directory on the university department’s server and left at students’ disposal. What was interesting in this follow-up was that discussion about the linkup between the corpus material and its output was not only useful in guiding the students to interpret the data, but also provided them with ideas to build their own corpora. From the teacher’s point of view, this seemed to me very interesting because it also implied a change of perspective in the teacher’s role. While this task was started with the idea of introducing students to a corpus that was prepared for them (according to what the teachers thought the students’ needs might be), students contributed to the task by also making clear

Chapter 5. Guiding the learners to work with corpora and corpus data

what they thought they actually needed and collected corpora that provide a larger view of what the language of marketing may be understood to be.

. Conclusion As I have shown above, unlike the examples provided by textbooks and dictionaries, the samples of language provided by concordance materials do not immediately illustrate particular linguistic patterns and may not provide the type of information that is expected by the students. Students, then, need to be provided with linguistic and metalinguistic knowledge that helps them carry out less frustrating searches and interpret the material correctly. Interpretative work, though, is largely a matter of students’ local or general interests and such interests are very difficult to predict. Students analyzing concordances seem to be attracted by all sorts of things, which may all, in some way, be considered “interesting” for their language or cultural learning. In the next chapter, I illustrate and discuss a series of tasks performed by the students focusing on the learners’ rather than the teachers’ point of view. Observing students working with the data, it seems that concordances attract their attention and involve them. In particular, concordances seem to provide puzzles to those who look at them and require an action to solve them. As mentioned in 4.4, a concordance can be viewed as a text that provokes “a pragmatic reaction” in the observer. This pragmatic reaction can constitute a starting point for involving students in authentic discourse. Aston (1988) identifies two ways in which learners can authenticate discourse, taking the role of a. a participant or b. an observer. While the participant interacts with the text as an intended recipient, the observer views the interaction from the outside, adopting a critical, analytic perspective. Observer as well as participant roles can facilitate learning: observation allows strategies of interaction to be noticed, while participation allows such strategies to be tested. “Reacting to” concordance data through analysis and interpretation provides opportunities for learners to participate as observers and participants in discourse by analyzing the occurrences and eventually choosing patterns to textualise the meanings students want to express. In what follows I shall look at such opportunities and how they are created and developed interactively in the classroom or in self-access activities.

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

Notes . The complete worksheet of the task discussed here is provided in Appendix 3. . The keyword lists were generated comparing frequency lists from each of the sub-corpora to the BNC list (written component).

Chapter 6

Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts Spies in action

. Introduction In the previous chapters, I discussed the relevance of introducing concordance analysis to learners, and suggested that corpus work helps them look at language through a more “idiomatic” perspective which may be particularly useful in ESP learning. I also discussed the problem of guiding the students to perform corpus analysis and to “read” concordance data. What “may be” interesting for students (from the teacher’s or researcher’s point of view) however, does not necessarily coincide with what “is” interesting (from their own point of view). Finding something interesting in whatever type of text is a matter of personal interpretation and depends on the individual interaction of the analyst (student, teacher or researcher) with that text. In this chapter, I show some students’ searches and attempt to focus on the students’ interaction with corpus material, their “discoveries” and what they found interesting. Here, I report some learners’ searches which seem to me clear in illustrating the type of work which is stimulated by concordance analysis. Some of the activities which produced the searches follow the line proposed in Chapter 5 to guide the learners to perform corpus work and, in this respect, I hope they also provide more material for teachers to organize their own activities in the classroom. The activities are introduced here in a sort of “escalating” order, from simplest (involving little instrumental and metalinguistic ability) to more and more complex ones. In Section 6.1, I describe the type of approach the students take when working with specialized corpora; in Section 6.2, I present some work aimed at grasping technical lexis and concepts. In Section 6.3 I deal with data comparison from different (specialized and general or bilingual) corpora and focus on: a) determining the generalizability of

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

use of a seemingly specialized word; b) contrasting conventions in the usage of specialized words in English and Italian. In Section 6.4, I look at students’ comparisons of their own findings with “authoritative” language explanations such as those provided by reference materials and/or the teachers, and I focus on the case of the progressive tense in medical research articles. In Section 6.5, I illustrate the work of students producing texts – a translation of a medical abstract and a political speech.

. Corpora and ESP learners: “Spies” In proposing her perspective on learners as corpus users, Bernardini (2000a: 142) argues that comparing learners to researchers has the limit of subordinating processes to findings and to obscuring those occasions of learning that emerge from the process itself of corpus use. To the “researcher” metaphor, Bernardini counterposes that of the “traveller”, where the experience of travelling through the corpus takes priority over the results, in the learning environment. As regards ESP, however, the metaphor of the traveler does have this limit: it emphasizes too little the aims and purposes of the traveller’s journey. While people take travels for pleasure, relaxation or vacation, corpus work may be neither pleasant nor relaxing and even “cultural aims” which may characterize both travelling and corpus work may be far from evident, at least at the point of departure. So, while it is true that the process of analysis and discovery is at least as important as the result itself of the analysis, we should also think of what may entice learners to engage in the journey. In the ESP environment, what often leads students to investigate corpora of specialized language is the attempt to work out characteristic aspects of such language. As Bernardini observes, however, the learners’ aim is not to provide systematic descriptions of linguistic characteristics, but rather to “understand” specialized language by collecting clues about values, ideas, concepts and conventions that are implicit in the text. To explain this approach, it seems to me that neither the “researcher” nor the “traveller” metaphor is quite suitable. Here, I propose to use a new metaphor again: that of the “spy”, developed from an idea introduced by Swales (1990: 29–32). In his well-known and often debated (see Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995; Askehave & Swales 2001; Starfield 2002; Bondi 2004) introduction to the concept of “discourse community”, Swales (1990: 30) discusses whether participating in a discourse community entails assimilation of its world’s view. Swales

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

maintains that while the answer is, generally speaking, “yes”, there are some “borderline” cases of people who participate in a discourse community without having (totally or even partially) assimilated its world view. These he calls “spies”. Swales takes, for instance, the example of a prospective son-in-law who may pretend to be a participating member of a bridge-playing community to make a favourable impression on his prospective parents-in-law, or that of journalists who may participate in a discourse community in order to be able to report on issues and problems dealt with inside. Swales is critical of “spies” because, he argues, such lack of assimilation may lead them to poor understanding of the issues and problems involved in the discourse of the discourse community. It seems to me that the very concept of “spy” is, in any case, interesting in a language learning perspective because, in a sense, it provides a “bridge” between insiders and outsiders of the discourse community. As Swales argues: Spies are only successful if they participate successfully in the relevant speech and discourse communities of the domain which they have infiltrated; however if they also assimilate they cease to be single spies but become doubleagents. (Swales 1990: 30)

Like spies, ESP language learners infiltrate the relevant speech and discourse community and in order to participate successfully they need at least to “understand” or become familiar with its views and conventions, which they can eventually go on to assimilate. Corpora of specialized language offer an instrument which students can explore, like “spies”, to collect indicative clues about the discourse community which produced the texts and to become familiar with its discourse conventions. Like spies, ESP learners can employ discourse conventions in a detached, instrumental way or they can eventually become “double-agents”. While the search process of spies is important to collect the clues, both the starting and the end points are important as well. The starting point generally consisting in a puzzle which becomes clearer or is solved in the end. Small corpora provide information about discourse conventions. As using a telephone is a puzzle for a Martian, such discourse conventions may be puzzles for outsiders. Corpus work offers an instrument to make sense out of such discourse conventions and in this way may favour the process of infiltration inside the discourse community and eventually the achievement of membership. In this chapter, I show and discuss what exactly the approach I am proposing here involves. Aston (2002) illustrates an experience where, by doing corpus work, students developed their ability to analyse language, to exploit compu-

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

tational resources and develop their autonomy as language learners, “getting their own teeth into the corpus”. Here, I illustrate a similar series of examples of language activities engaging students in corpus work. The activities typically start from a puzzle (e.g. grasping the meaning of a technical word, understanding particular features of discourse or writing out or translating a piece of specialized text) posed by the students or by the teacher, and students then work with corpora (and occasionally other materials) in the attempt to provide a solution to it. These searches favour an exploration of the corpus which highlights the “idiom” of the corpus in terms of recurrent combinations, typical structures (e.g. text-openings and closings) and other types of conventions. Such conventions reflect the “world of knowledge” that the corpus texts entail. Through concordance exploration, learners are led into such a world of knowledge as observers (by finding typical language patterns) and as participants (by adapting and manipulating such typical language patterns to their own needs in, e.g., writing or translation). As mentioned above, the corpora the inquiries start from are specialised corpora constructed ad hoc by either the students or the teacher. Results from such initial searches are then compared with results from publicly available medium-size corpora and the BNC. The inquiries I illustrate start from rather simple searches and rather simple learning problems (e.g. getting the meaning of a technical word) and then move on to searches with increasing degrees of complexity involving more and more autonomy on the part of the students. Exploring conventions of an idiomatic type and recurrent combinations of words, students are gradually introduced to more general conventions which characterize the “world of knowledge” of the discourse community that is being “spied” upon.

. Using a small corpus of specialized texts to discover technical concepts As many ESP studies observe (see Nation 2001b: Ch. 6 for a discussion) and as Widdowson (1998b) also points out, specific lexis is one of the key problems in teaching and learning ESP. As Widdowson (1998b: 9) states, then, specific lexis can be a problem for ESP language learners not because they do not know the correct words, but because they lack experience of a “whole new way of conceptualizing” that is characteristic of the discourse community using that word, as in the case of the Martian and the telephone.1 Similarly, ESP lexis

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

constitutes a puzzle for ESP learners because it involves values and conventions shared by a discourse community, which are not familiar to outsiders. In the following two sections, I illustrate two experiences of students working with corpora of specialized language to discover the concept entailed in two specialized words, one from the field of medicine, the other from the field of economics. The puzzle, which constitutes the starting point of the research, is the actual meaning of the words: the students found them several times in texts they were trying to translate or read and were not able to attribute any sense to them. The two experiences, though, are different in two main respects: first they emerge from different teaching contexts (a translation class in the first case and a reading class in the second), second they involve different types of “specialized” words. The medical word, the acronym RIBA, is rare in English (13 occurrences in the BNC, all in one text2 ) and, at the time the research was carried out, was not included in medical dictionaries; the economic word “bid” is much more common, (2379 occurrences in the BNC) and is included in, e.g., the Cobuild Dictionary. In both cases, though, the students were not able to grasp the concept connected to the word by simply looking at its definition (either in the dictionary, the encyclopedia or in the specialised text) and corpus work was useful in enabling them to conceptualize the medical/economic world. .. A medical word: The case of the acronym “RIBA” The first word I deal with is the medical word “RIBA”. Like many medical words, it is in fact an acronym abbreviating a combination of three words. The students found this word during an exercise in which they were translating a medical text about hepatitis C from English into Italian. The puzzle was not actually constituted by the translation of this word into Italian (having some experience in medical translation, students could well imagine that these acronyms are usually the same in the two languages), but rather it seemed to the students that lacking the conceptual information this word entailed constituted a major obstacle for their understanding the text in general. Having checked the meaning of RIBA in the medical dictionaries which were available at the local university library, the students found that this word was not included. We then decided to look at a small corpus of medical research articles dealing with hepatitis C, which we had previously put together. A concordance of “RIBA” immediately showed the extended meaning of the acronym. As can be seen in the concordance below (concordance 9, ll. 2, 4, 6), “Riba” means “recombinant immunoblot assay”, which meant absolutely

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

ary tests, a LIA (Innogenetics) and a RIBA (Chiron). The results obtained by all eration recombinant immunoblot assay (RIBA) (Chiron) were used. HBV Mar as detected by PCR (Table I). LIA and RIBA could be performed in only 2 of these ith the recombinant immunoblot assay (RIBA-Chiron, Emeryville and Ortho, Raritan regions of the HCV sequence. PCR and RIBA II immunoblot assays were done on sel he multiple epitope immunoblot assay (RIBA II) is an attractive solution to the ). ELISA-II results were confirmed by RIBA in 48 out of 51 (94,1%) cases tested, . In 3 patients not tested by LIA and RIBA, serum samples drawn at earlier times esults, 2 confirmatory tests (LIA and RIBA) were carried out with a part of the

Concordance 9. “riba” in the hepatitis medical corpus (41,000 words).

nothing to the students and offers a nice example of one of the many cases where knowing the name of the object does not entail being able to make sense out of it. Other clues, however, attracted the attention of the students in this concordance, in particular the occurrence of “confirmatory tests” in line 9 and of the verb “confirm” in line 7. These suggested to the students that “RIBA” was a confirmatory test of some kind and encouraged them to look at the extended context of the occurrences in concordance 9. The extended context (see concordance 10 below) revealed a recurrence of the words “confirm” and “confirmatory” in the vicinity of “RIBA” (underlined in the concordance). When “confirm”/“confirmatory” were not used, we could see occurrences of words such as “supplementary” (ex. (1)), “were then tested” (ex. (4)), “were also tested” (ex. (5)) suggesting that “RIBA” was in fact an additional test probably performed to confirm results from other tests. The concordance also provided more information. It was noted, for instance, that RIBA is a test performed on blood serum (and the form “to perform a test” was noted also), that it is similar to another test called LIA, that it is used to confirm hepatitis C virus infection and to confirm results from other tests called ELISA and PCR. (1) identified as antibody positive. Enough serum was available from 42 patients to carry out 2 supplementary tests, a LIA (Innogenetics) and a RIBA (Chiron). The results obtained by all the tests are shown in Table II. All 4 antibody detection systems yielded consistent results in 28 (2) d in duplicate. As confirmatory tests, the INNO-line immunoassay (LIA) (Innogenetics) and a second-generation recombinant immunoblot assay (RIBA) (Chiron) were used. HBV Markers Hepatitis B surface and e antigens and their antibodies were measured using ELISA (Abbott (3) n 6 patients. Of the 68 patients, 15 were antibody negative using both ELISAs. In 8 (53%) viral RNA was detected by PCR (Table I). LIA and RIBA could be performed in only 2 of these cases (Table II). In one case both confirmatory tests yielded positive results, thus confirming

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

(4) considered the anti-HCV titer. Certain serum samples which were positiv in ELISA-II were then tested with the recombinant immunoblot assay (RIBA-Chiron, Emeryville and Ortho, Raritan, NJ, U.S.A.). This assay uses all 4 recombinant HCV antigens (C100; 5-1-1; C-33c (5) 3 and capsid polypeptides; selected cases were also tested against synthetic peptides derived from different regions of the HCV sequence. PCR and RIBA II immunoblot assays were done on selected sera. Each of 55 probable and 5 of 11 possible hepatitis cases who were seronegative before transfusio (6) ral causes of transaminase elevation by our clinical review committee may also have played a role. The multiple epitope immunoblot assay (RIBA II) is an attractive solution to the problem of multivalent testing; however, this assay is too expensive for large scale research use and is (7) of anti-HCV positive cases than ELISA-I in both resolved (21/22, 95%) and chronic cases (91/92, 100%).ELISA-II results were confirmed by RIBA in 48 out of 51 (94,1%) cases tested, and were indeterminate in the remaining 3 (5.9%). When certain sera which had been obtained (8) own in Figure 3, HCV RNA was detected by PCR in 4 different serum samples drawn previously from this patient. In 3 patients not tested by LIA and RIBA, serum samples drawn at earlier times were investigated and in 2 of these patients, virus was already detectable in all of the earlier samples (9) the second generation ELISA clearly had a higher detection rate. To control the reliability of the ELISA results, 2 confirmatory tests (LIA and RIBA) were carried out with a part of the serum samples. However, clear discrepancies between the 4 antibody assays were observed in 33% of the cases

Concordance 10. “riba” in the hepatitis medical corpus (41,000 words), extended context.

While single students collected different clues, they discussed their “readings” together to try and make sense out of the acronym RIBA. In doing so, they recreated a whole new frame of reference characterizing issues and problems of the hepatitis C medical community, for instance the problem of diagnosing hepatitis C, which is not an easy task and involves exploitation and evaluation of many different tests (ELISA, PCR, LIA and the RIBA itself). Example (6) also showed students that there may be a range of problems to be dealt with in choosing which tests to perform, for instance that of available funds, which also explains why the RIBA is used as a confirmatory test rather than a large scale screening: The multiple epitope immunoblot assay (RIBA) is an attractive solution to the problem of multivalent testing; however this assay is too expensive for large scale research use and is also somewhat insensitive.

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

The search for the meaning of “RIBA” and the exploration of its recurrent usage, then, involved the reconstruction of a world of problems connected with the diagnosis of hepatitis C. This reconstruction was based on clues derived from the first concordance that were then checked against the second concordance which provided extended contexts for the various occurrences and were finally discussed by students in groups. Because the concordances did not provide a full, comprehensive explanation of RIBA, but only some details, they were used by students as clues to solve their initial puzzle of understanding what RIBA actually meant. Through the discussion, students formulated their own definition of RIBA and grew familiar with a range of both ideational issues (involved in hepatitis C research) and linguistic features, such as the difference between two apparently similar words “assay” and “test”, where the former refers specifically to biochemical tests and the latter seems to be used as a more general term. Hypotheses raised in the discussion were then checked through more reading of medical papers (in English and Italian), encyclopedia entries and medical handbooks. Students then worked with the concordances “as spies” to obtain clues which provided them with a path to enter the world of this medical discourse community. Incidentally, such work promoted reading of specialized texts (hepatitis C papers), use of reference works (encyclopedias, handbooks) and group discussion. .. A word from economics: The case of “bid” As mentioned above, the case of “bid” emerged out of a rather different teaching context. The students here were undergraduates in languages and European studies, a university course training them to deal with international business and politics within the European community. One of the activities of these students is that of reading (or listening to) and discussing business news in English in order to become familiar with the language and issues involved. “Bid” emerged as a reading comprehension problem (“What does “bid” mean?”). “Bid” is obviously not a “rare” and specific word like “RIBA” (whose meaning is probably unfamiliar to many native speakers of English) and it was then addressed by checking a bilingual dictionary and the Cobuild dictionary. Both provided two main meanings for the noun “bid”: first, “an attempt to obtain or do something”; second, “an offer to pay a particular amount of money for something that is being sold”. While this partially solved the local understanding problem, the students did not seem to be completely satisfied with the definitions. On the one hand, they noticed that their example was probably

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

best explained by merging the two definitions of the dictionaries, rather than choosing just one; on the other hand, they failed to find Italian equivalents to make the concept clear and were not able to explain what “bid” meant in their own words. To investigate the concept better in the attempt to attach it to an Italian form (and presumably a more familiar reality), a concordance of “bid” was produced out of a small corpus of business newspaper articles (MCA – business section, about 200,000 words). The concordance found 249 occurrences, which the students analyzed, working together in small groups (the concordance is shown in Appendix 5). Looking at the concordance, left sorted, students noticed recurrent combinations of the word “bid”, for instance that a bid is often qualified by the amount of money it involves; thus we have examples such as “the £1.1bn bid”, “a £13bn bid”, “a $1.5bn bid”. A frequent pattern with “bid” (20 occurrences) is “a takeover bid” which led the students to investigate what a “takeover bid” might be. They looked at the extended context of the “takeover bid” occurrences (see concordance 11, below) and noted that it involved a lot of money (“mega takeover bid”, l.13) and big companies (“a £1.1bn takeover bid for the group by Australian Mutual Provident, Australia’s largest life insurance group” l.18). Working with the examples, using their knowledge of the meaning of “takeover” and the “takeover” entry from the Cobuild dictionary, the students quickly understood that “a takeover bid” is a huge offer made with the purpose of gaining the control of a company. (1) ed by a spate of bid rumours, the most sensational of which was that Adia, the big Swiss-based recruitment consultant, was about to launch a takeover bid. By lunchtime the tongues were really wagging and talk of LBOs, MBOs, an imminent sale of the management consultancy b (2) Group, the British life insurance company, are meeting over the next few days amid speculation that the Australian group is poised to mount a takeover bid for Pearl worth at least œ1bn. Australian Mutual Provident executives were yesterday believed to be mounting plans for a ta (3) osals from British, US and Continental companies,” the source said. GEC, Ferranti’s main British rival in radar, is also keen to mount a takeover bid but would encounter fierce Ministry of Defence opposition on the grounds that it would damage competition in electronics procur (4) r its profits growth. Charles Saatchi is a director of the main board. Market speculation that Saatchi ∧ Saatchi could be the target of a takeover bid has been intensified by South Eastern Asset Management, a Tennessee- based fund manager, which recently amassed a 1 (5) m of the outstanding 50 per cent of Carat. Page 31 PERRIER BUBBLES: Perrier’s shares surged on the Paris bourse on speculation of a takeover bid for the French

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

mineral water group. The shares rose Fr212, or 11.2 per cent, to Fr1,962. Food group BSN, widely mentioned as a (6) a sweeping re-think about the group’s direction. It comes at a time of growing fear that Saatchi ∧ Saatchi may become the subject of a takeover bid as a result of recent business problems. Mr Saatchi will continue as chairman but is being replaced as chief executive (7) in door-to-door collection of insurance premiums from customers. Following legislative reforms, it has red as a move designed to ward off a takeover bid. If Pearl decided to resist the overtures of AMP it will be the second major takeover battle in the British life assurance sector (8) oldrums since late 1987. Mr Louis-Dreyfus will have to work hard to recover the company’s standing. He may also have to fight off a takeover bid _ Fininvest, the Milan-based media company controlled by Silvio Berlusconi revealed a 1 per cent holding last week. Elsewhe (9) more formal inquiries. As officials began their investigations the board of directors of Pearl, led by chairman Einion Holland, said AMP’s takeover bid ‘is unacceptable and totally inadequate because it fails to reflect the group’s financial strength and prospects”. Pearl advis (10) _ to help the Coventry-based firm to fend off Ford, which has already announced it plans to take a 15 per cent holding as a prelude to a full takeover bid. Jaguar’s shares soared again on the stock market, closing 62p up at 731p – valuing the company at œ1.323bn. As an (11) degree of autonomy”, BAe said yesterday. The news comes as BAe and Thomson begin talks with Ferranti on the possibility of a joint takeover bid for the beleaguered UK defence electronic company. Ferranti, which recently announced it would have to write off œ185m as t (12) aid: ‘We maintain a good contact with SHV and are relaxed about their shareholding.” Two years ago the two companies made a joint takeover bid worth œ820m for Calor, the bottled gas company. The offer, conditional on a recommendation from the Calor board, was withdraw (13) PAIN SCOTTISH ∧ Newcastle Breweries starred again yesterday as the stock market was gripped by rumours that a mega takeover bid was imminent. In often busy trading Scottish shares frothed up 20p to 389p with stories flowing that the French BSN foods (14) 014 Market Report: Rothmans lights up at close of uneasy account By DEREK PAIN IS THE much rumoured takeover bid for Rothmans International, the tobacco and luxury goods group, about to materialise at long, long last? As the stock ma (15) st crash standards, busy trading. However, interest rate fears remain in the background and the undertone is still fragile. A œ1.9bn US takeover bid, by McCaw for Mteromedia, excited telecommunication shares. The Racal ‘twins”, British Telecom, which has 24 per cent of McC

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts (16) on into the steep rise in the share price of Pearl Group, the British life insurer, last Friday ahead of the announcement yesterday of a œ1.1bn takeover bid for the group by Australian Mutual Provident, Australia’s largest life insurance group. On Friday the share price of Pearl Gro (17) s probe: The Stock Exchange is investigating Friday’s steep rise in the share price of Pearl Group, the life insurer, ahead of a œ1.1bn takeover bid by Australian Mutual Provident. This page and View from City Road, page 27 Exchange change: The end of the alpha, beta, g (18) set but Sir Geoffrey has been asked to make specific recommendations ‘as soon as possible”. Threat to insurers AS THE œ1.1bn takeover bid by Australian Mutual Provident, Australia’s largest life insurer, gets underway for the Pearl Group, a new survey suggests that (19) tor could be seriously eroded in the next few weeks. Missed Pearl PEARL, the beleagured British insurer facing an unwelcome œ1.1bn takeover bid from Australian Mutual Provident, Australia’s largest life insurer, appears intent on valuing the goodwill associated with business (20) stock prices in New York gave the controversial developer Donald Trump the pretext he needed to drop an ill-fated dollars 7.5bn ( œ4.8bn) takeover bid for American Airlines yesterday. Citing ‘recent changes in market conditions”, he withdrew a dollars 120-a-share bid for the

Concordance 11. “takeover bid” in MCA business section (200,000 words), extended context

Analysing the “takeover bid” concordance, though, students also noted other features of the text anticipating and following “bid”. First, these “takeover bids” are talked about as possibly forthcoming, not as having taken place (as students might expect from reading the news) and we have several examples involving future possibility or probability: “speculation of a takeover bid” (l.5), “GEC, Ferranti’s main British rival in radar, is also keen to mount a takeover bid” (l.3), “This was quickly followed by a spate of bid rumours, the most sensational of which was that Adia, the big Swiss-based recruitment consultant, was about to launch a takeover bid” (l.1). Second, students noted that such “bids” seemed to involve a battle or a competition, e.g. “fight off a takeover bid” (l.8), “a move designed to ward off a takeover bid” (l.7), “Saatchi ∧ Saatchi could be the target of a takeover bid” (l.4). It was noted that both features, that bids were talked about in terms of speculation and rumours and that they involved competition, were not limited to the “takeover bid” pattern, but seemed to affect the occurrences of “bid” more in general. Students noted the recurrence of “bid rumours” (5 occurrences), “bid speculation” (7 occurrences), as well as many other occurrences involving planning and strat-

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

egy: “Tomkins’ shares fell 7p to 276p on fears it is planning to mount a bid”, “The transatlantic gossip of a bid battle for Jaguar between Ford and General Motors”, “But the likelihood of a bid would still appear dependent on his ability to find a third partner”. Forms of “fight” and “battle”(used as nouns, verbs or adjectives), were also noted to be frequently mentioned, forming recurrent collocations, e.g. “fighting bid”, “defending a bid”, “hostile bid”, or in the more extended context “British Aerospace, possibly in partnership with Thomson CSF of France, has emerged as the leading British contender to mount a bid but could face Ministry of Defence objections”. Such observations led the students to delve more deeply into the texts they were exploring, asking themselves why papers should talk of bids in terms of fighting and strategy and getting them to discuss the way in which bids (and other acquisitions) affect the stock market. Understanding the conventions of usage related to the word “bid”, then, involved familiarizing oneself with a whole series of concepts connected with the world of the stock market business. Although the dictionary definitions were good and indeed corresponded in the end to the students’ idea of “bid”, they were not enough to introduce students into the “world of bid” initially. Exploring the concordance, students collected clues which, step by step, introduced them to the discourse of business that the word “bid” involved – a strategic competition carried out in order to obtain participation in or control of a company. .. Conclusion Both “RIBA” and “bid” represented interesting cases because, even though they are different in many ways (“RIBA” is really a technical-scientific concept, is not included in general dictionaries and rarely so even in specialized ones; “bid” is more widespread and is found in most monolingual and bilingual dictionaries of English), they represented concepts which were not familiar to the students’ world and reality. While definitions of these words, both from the encyclopedia and the dictionary, partially helped the students to understand what kind of object they represented, they were not enough to lead the students’ inside the world that made use of these objects. Concordance lines were not good (particularly in the case of “bid”) at explaining the concepts directly, but they provided clues about the recurrent, conventional behaviour of such words which the students explored and discussed and which gradually drew them inside the reality of the text and promoted discourse. Repetition of patterns, which is highlighted in the concordance format (the repetition of “confirm” in the RIBA concordance, or of “takeover” or “speculation” in the

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

“bid” concordance), attracted the students’ attention and encouraged them in their attempt to attribute a sense to such repetition. To explore their hypotheses (“is “Riba” a confirmatory test?”, “does a bid involve competition?”) students classified the occurrences and were occasionally attracted by instances which seemed to best answer their questions. By asking questions and looking for answers (which were eventually found) students promoted their own participation in the community’s discourse.

. From a single corpus to more corpora: Comparing data Studies in corpus linguistics (e.g. Biber et al. 1998, see Section 4.3) have noted that concordance analysis is inherently comparative and that concordance sets are generally much better explained when seen in contrast. Such comparisons and contrasts often involve data from different corpora, e.g. specialized and general or corpora in different languages. The comparative nature of corpus work is interesting also in an ESP learning perspective. The concordances of “RIBA” and “bid” offered intriguing material for the students who analysed and discussed it and eventually found out the meanings and concepts these words referred to. However, not all concordances (indeed not many of them) provide material to answer the students’ questions in a sufficiently immediate way. As mentioned in Chapter 5 (Section 5.1), concordances are just samples of usage of words, not examples. For this reason they do not “exemplify” a concept as a dictionary might do, but simply provide material to construct one’s own exemplification. Indeed, they may provide no occurrence at all or not enough of them. In Chapter 3, I noted that the very fact that concordances do not provide “exemplifications” is what, in my view, provokes a pragmatic reaction from the students who are encouraged to make sense out of seemingly senseless material. Even in those cases when a search does not produce any occurrence or enough evidence to build up hypotheses, such lack of material provokes a reaction from the students who generally ask why this is so. This “limit” of concordance material, then, prompts the students to interact with more materials, either from different corpora (e.g. larger corpora) or from corpora in different languages (e.g. the foreign language and their own), thus carrying out comparative work. In this section, I show some examples of students’ searches involving comparison and contrast of data from corpora of different sizes, built with different criteria and/or in different languages. In these cases too, the exploratory process

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

involved in comparing the data led the students to discussion and participation in what was in this case the medical discourse. .. How specialized is a specialized word? The case of the word “disorder” Analysis of specialized words like the ones shown above not only provides students with information about the meanings and concepts entailed in the texts, it also introduces them to the method of corpus work and leads them to appreciate it more and more. The students who carried out translation work with medical texts and were involved in the search for “RIBA” found corpus work of great use for their translation activity: indeed, asked whether more medical corpora, including topics other than Hepatitis C might be available for their own work as translators. This led to a project where students were involved in making up their own small corpora of texts similar to those they had to translate. In groups, they built up most of the small, specialized corpora which are listed in Chapter 1 (Section 1.4.2). This provided the whole group of students with more material to compare. The search I am dealing with in this section started from a translation task where students were involved in translating a medical article about child epilepsy from Italian into English while working with a 70,000 word corpus of medical articles on the same subject in English. They noted that the word “disorder” was used to refer to the illness they were dealing with and though this did not cause them any problems in understanding, someone asked whether there was any difference between the words “illness”, “disease” and “disorder”. A check in the Cobuild Dictionary provided rather similar definitions: Illness:

1. is the fact or experience of being ill, 2. is a particular disease such as measles or pneumonia Disease: is an illness which affects people, animals or plants, for example one which is caused by bacteria or infection Disorder: is a problem or illness which affects someone’s mind or body

The students then decided to generate a concordance and have a look at the instances. They found 26 occurrences, shown in Concordance 12, below. As can be seen, in this concordance 13 occurrences out of 26 are instances of a single collocation “seizure disorder”, 12 of them coming from a single text. The remaining 13 occurrences show more varied uses, suggesting that “disorder” might in fact be considered more or less a synonym of “illness” and “disease”.

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

cond, knowledge of the incidence of a in infancy, cerebral palsy , autistic years). Four children had behavioral umor, infarction, trauma, or bleeding ervices. The prevalence of a chronic p and another 77 (16%) had a learning rologist. Many epilepsy ”look-alike” lready had iden tifiable neurological f children who had other neurological t syndrome or in certain neurological ding influence of duration of seizure nificantly longer duration of seizure s not only the existence of a seizure on between IQ and duration of seizure re (9% variance), duration of seizure icus (r = -0.38), duration of seizure ables (SES score, duration of seizure atus epilepticus, duration of seizure et of epilepsy 2. Duration of seizure d at various times during the seizure w IQ, followed by duration of seizure e reported that children with seizure ave been made of children with severe disorder but also the severity of the some point in the evolution of their nfantile spasms in this study. These

disorder helps project local needs for pro disorder, cortical blindness. Mentality: F disorders but no history of seizures, and disorder within a week of the illness beca disorder such as epilepsy may be even more disorder. The first seizure type was g disorders that are common in childhood wer disorders and, in several of those who did disorders and not seizures. All informati disorders, e.g., tuberous sclerosis. disorder and drug therapy, we performed a disorder and drug therapy (Table 6). Beca disorder but also the severity of the diso disorder in children with epilepsy. Resul disorder (6% variance), and sex of the chi disorder (r = - 0.3l ), and total number o disorder, and sex of the child) explained disorder, and SES score (Table 5). The me disorder, i.e., time period since the firs disorder, generally after a pattern of int disorder. Determination of whether a gene disorders with onset at earlier age have l disorders. The effects of currently avail disorder. Perhaps the severity of the und disorder. The inclusion and exclusion disorders virtually always present with se

Concordance 12. “disorder*” in the epilepsy medical corpus (70,000 words), sorted by the first word to the left

There were not in fact very many occurrences of “disorder”. To get a more varied range of collocations and presumably a larger number, it was suggested to the students that they checked a larger corpus of medical articles of varied subjects. To their surprise (and mine), they found just one more occurrence of “disorder” in the full 250,000 word corpus. This finding prompted the students to “go on” with their search and to understand more about this odd distribution. They checked data from yet another corpus, the medical component of the MCB corpus (200,000 words). There, they found 29 occurrences from various files, which suggested that the use of “disorder/s” was actually rather widespread. Nevertheless, even this corpus did not provide as many occurrences as the students had expected, and this raised the hypothesis that there might in fact be a difference between the use of “disorder/s” and that of other words with a similar meaning such as “disease/s” or “illness/es” – for instance “disorder” might simply be less commonly used. A search for “illness/illnesses” and “disease/diseases” in the medical component of the MCB corpus provided 41 occurrences of the former and 210 of the latter. Students abandoned the analysis of “illness” at this point and concentrated on the more frequent “disease”. Comparing concordances of “disease” and “disorder”, they noted that the

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

patients with recurrent affective with recurrent unipolar affective lf-ideas that perpetuate affective mstances. In certain serious blood r the sign of a generalized bodily not be a coincidence that cardiac pallingly high rate of circulatory will now consider severe clinical ure may be the result of an eating rted by Simpson (1975). The eating o exist between cutting and eating male infertility and other genital t observed in some renal and heart , and because there are rare human II YOUR BODY CLOCK IN titis simply means an inflammatory r, high blood pressure, and mental chance of having some neurological f ordering our affairs, it is only applied diagnosis is ‘personality agnosis of ‘borderline personality ctive illnesses and/or personality ed. If a patient has a psychiatric idence of her having a psychiatric y was suffering from a psychiatric ffering from any other psychiatric ies are suffering from psychiatric el> Those with serious psychiatric tate will include treatment of the

disorders are currently under investigation. disorders.

The use of electroconvulsi disorders. Setting limits to treatment disorders it can invade other parts of the bo disorder? 8. Is it pr disorders are most frequent at the time of wa disorders (including stroke and heart attack) disorders which bear this out. Patients disorder). There is dispute as to whether cut disorders include compulsive overeating and disorders, which were found in 15 (65 per disorders. There are 25 university and 25 mun disorders; then the rate of urine flow on lyi disorders in which selfmutilation may be a fe DISORDER

We have disorder of the liver and it can be caused by disorders will serve to illustrate the ways i disorder, ranging from deafness and blind disorder. It is arbitrary, irrational, and do disorder”. Unfortunately this diagnosis is of disorder” (p. 35) would often be used for suc disorders (Copas and Robin 1982). A history o disorder this must be included in his list of disorder, although it was clear that she had disorder, or that there was a risk of suicide disorder. There appeared no reason to suspect disorders and are usually at high risk of mak disorders, especially depression with serious disorder that has led to the disturbance and

Concordance 13. “disorder*” in the MCB medical component (200,000 words; see Murison-Bowie 1993c), left sorted

two sets of examples were markedly different. In particular “disorder/s” seemed to be more selective than “disease” in its combinations, showing a preference to collocate with words belonging to a “mental” semantic area. As shown in Concordance 13 above, in 14 cases “affective”, “psychiatric”, “personality”, “neurological”, “mental” appear as left-collocates of “disorder/s”. Furthermore “eating disorder/s” (ll. 9–11) refers to anorexia as a psychiatric illness, and in at least 3 other cases (12, 14 and 29) the extended context clearly refers to illnesses of a psychological or psychiatric nature. Given the size and the composition of the corpus (the MCB medical component totals 200,000 words taken from a mere 7 chapters), this data were obviously not conclusive, but the suggested selectivity of “disorder” for neurological illnesses seemed also to explain its distribution in the medical research papers corpus, where “disorder/s” occurred almost exclusively in articles dealing with epilepsy, a neurological illness. Concordances of “disease/s” in the corpus of medical articles confirmed that “disease” is more frequent than “disorder” and suggested a more general use. Interestingly enough, then, there

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts 

were no occurrences of “disease/s” with “mental”, “neurological”, “personality” or “psychiatric” in either the research paper corpus or the MCB medical component, a finding which supported the hypothesis of a “preference” for “disorder/s” to occur in such contexts. At this point, the students went back to the (corpus-based) Cobuild Dictionary entry and noted that such association of “disorder/s” with mental illnesses was suggested both in the definition (where “mind” comes before “body”) and, more clearly, in the examples, which are all occurrences where “disorder/s” refers to mental, neurological or psychiatric illnesses. A check in the BNC also seems to confirm this preference: of 125 examples where “disorder/s” means “illness” (manually selected from 200 randomly selected ones), about 70 collocate with words belonging to the mental/neurological area (“mental”, “personality”, “psychiatric”, “nervous”) and another 15 occur in what are clearly mental/ psychological contexts. Checking different and larger sets of data, then, threw light on the usage of “disorder” and on the very concept it embodies, a finding which the single epilepsy corpus could not make evident (see also Gavioli 2002). While checking other corpora and data (e.g. the BNC) was suggested or performed by the teacher to confirm the students’ hypothesis, the construction and discussion of the hypothesis itself was extremely interesting. In comparing different sets of data, either concordances of the same word from different corpora or concordances of similar words (e.g. “disease”/“disorder”) from the same corpus, students discussed the various instances, trying to establish whether the illnesses they referred to were of a psychiatric nature or not, and noted for example that “eating disorders” were in fact anorexia and bulimia. By the way, looking at the concordance of “disease/s” in the MCB medical component students noticed an association of this word with sexually transmitted illnesses, a finding which was not confirmed by the combined medical corpus and which was probably motivated by the presence of a chapter (1 out of 7) about sexually transmitted diseases in the MCB medical component. This, however, led to further text reading and discoveries concerning the medical discourse. As with “RIBA” and “Bid” above, even in this case, students’ discussion involved their attempt to grasp a whole new way of conceptualizing and understanding the “world” of the medical community.

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

.. Exploring corpora in different languages: Contrasting English and Italian data Wichmann (1995) notes that using concordances with learners of English may be very useful to help them interact more skilfully with reference materials such as dictionaries and grammars, a point that is evident also in the “disorder” case, above. In particular, she suggests that concordances may help promote students’ semantic awareness of both the foreign language and their own. In the activity she illustrates in her paper (1995: 62) she asks students to look at concordances of English words (e.g. “ask*”, “accident*”) and to find possible equivalents in the students’ mother tongue (German). This raised awareness of shades of meaning of both English and German, of context variation and of the fact that there was rarely total overlap between two words and, for example, the verb “ask” might correpond to “fragen”, “eine Frage stellen” or “bitten”. Comparing the foreign language with their own seems in fact to be highly motivating for students, even when translation is not involved. Working with concordances and learners, I noted that one of the most challenging ways for students to compare different sets of data is that of contrasting concordances in the foreign language and their own. This does not only highlight differences (or similarities) between the two languages, but may also be helpful in fully understanding the meaning of a concept and its conventional usage. Comparing data in their own language, students see differences and similarities, improve their awareness of their own language (as Wichmann 1995 observes), and understand the data in the foreign language better. In the case of “RIBA” for instance, a concordance from a similar size corpus of hepatitis research articles in Italian made it very clear that the Riba is in fact a confirmatory test and gave the students a sort of guarantee that they understood the English data well. Notice the recurrence of the words “conferma”/“confermato” on the left side of the search word in the following Italian concordance: 1 ienti presentavano un test di conferma in 2 ’HCVAb (determinazione e/o conferma in 3 positivit. . . per anti-HCV, confermata con 4 positivi all’ELISA sono stati confermati al 5 t HCV EIA) e nei positivi confermato con 6 on RIBA di II generazione (Ortho-Chiron 7 o poi sui sieri conservati, lo screening in

RIBA indeterminato. Si trattava di una gi RIBA); d) “C+ pregressa B”: ove Š RIBA, nelle epatobiopsie con segni istol RIBA, tranne 2, che sono risultati indeter RIBA di II generazione (Ortho-Chiron Ri Riba HCV), sul siero di 88 pazienti in dia RIBA-Ortho. I controlli ematologici prev

Concordance 14. “riba” in a medical corpus of texts about hepatitis (40,000 words)

In this section, I show an example where students compare corpora in English and Italian. In the first part (6.3.2.1), they contrast the use of the word

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts 

“history” and “storia” in medical research papers in the two languages. In the following one (6.3.2.2) students take the search for “history” and “storia” a step further to include more data from larger and more general corpora. ... The case of “history” and “storia” in medical research papers The search for “history” was prompted by an Italian-English translation problem in medical texts. As the Italian word “storia” may correspond to both “story” and “history” in English, in the attempt to translate “pazienti con storia di epatite” (patients with a history of hepatitis), students asked which of the two was used in this context. Being now rather well-trained in the use of corpora, they searched both words in the combined corpus of medical research papers (250,000 words). Results provided 131 occurrences of “history” and none of “story”, immediately answering the students’ question. They also found a more extended recurrent pattern corresponding to what they wanted to translate: “patients with a history of [+ disease]”. Comparing the Italian chunk with the English data, students noticed that, while in Italian they had “pazienti con storia”, without any article preceding “storia”, the English occurrences were characterized by the indefinite article preceding “history”. As “pazienti con una storia” (the indefinite article preceding “storia”) sounded intuitively acceptable to the students, they decided to look at more data from an Italian medical corpus, similar in composition to the English one, to check whether the omission of the article was typical in Italian medical writing or a stylistic feature of their text. The Italian concordance of “storia” provided 35 occurrences. In 5 cases, the article “una” preceded “storia”, but in the remaining ones either no article or the definite article were used. Interestingly enough, there were 4 cases where “pazienti/soggetti con” (patients/subjects with) preceded “storia”, all with no article. To get more data, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

ildren without seizures or with only a ree studies excluded patients with a e first group includes patients with a e present only patients with a family Disease Risk Women with a family less than 40 years old with a family hic screening of women with a family e present, only patients with a family radiated tumours. Natural nclusion since 2 of 9 patients with no mean FSIQ of 16 children with a past mean FSIQ of 16 children with a past

history history history history history history history history history history history history

of of of of of of of of of of of of

febrile seizures. Patients i alcoholism. All enrolled su CNS insult (e.g., cerebral t breast cancer should be off breast cancer (generally o cancer are more in need of breast cancer. We questi breast cancer should be off unresected primary tumour seizures or only febrile sei status epilepticus was 9 p status epilepticus was 9 p

Concordance 15. “history” in the combined corpus of medical research papers (250,000 words)

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

students also checked a further corpus of Italian research articles (130,000 words) about stomach diseases which provided two more occurrences of “con storia” without any article preceding “storia”. Getting back to the English concordance of “history”, students noted that “a” seemed to precede “history” in most cases. They noted several occurrences of “a history” (38) forming two main collocations, “patient/s had a history” (11 occurrences) and “patients with/without a history” (5 occurrences), and many more of the construction “a + adjective + history” forming recurrent collocations such as: “a family history” (38), “a past/previous history” (6), “a medical/clinical history” (5). The single exception to this seemed to be provided by the adjective “natural”, which was in all cases anticipated by “the”, forming the collocation: “the natural history”. Moving from the English to the Italian corpora and backwards, then, the students observed the following: a. In English medical research papers, “a (adj) history” of an illness was the most frequent pattern; b. In Italian, “storia” was more frequently preceded by either the definite or no article, with a few occurrences of “una storia”; c. The Italian pattern “una storia” came in constructions like “avere una storia” (have a history), “presentare una storia” (show a history) and “essere caratterizati/contrassegnati da una storia (to be characterized by a history) d. The pattern “have a history” was common in the English concordance (11 occurrences), thus forming a match with the Italian pattern “avere una storia” (5 occurrences over 11 from both the combined and the stomach corpus) e. When “patients”/“pazienti” were mentioned, though, the English pattern “patients with a history” seemed to correspond to the Italian “pazienti con storia”, where English seemed to be characterized by the presence of the indefinite article “a” preceding “history” and Italian seemed to be characterized by the absence of any article; f. The single case when “the” was used preceding “history” in English, was “the natural history” (10 occurrences), possibly corresponding to the pattern “la storia naturale” which was recurrent in the Italian corpus (11 in the combined corpus and 21 in the stomach diseases corpus) g. “storia familiare” (family history) e “storia clinica” (clinical history) were rather common in Italian too (6 occurrences of “familiare” and 9 of “clinica” in the two Italian corpora put together), but they were often preceded by the definite, not the indefinte article.

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts 

While observing the data from the corpora, students looked at the extended context of the concordances in the attempt to account for the linguistic differences and similarities between the two languages. Looking at “the natural history”/la storia naturale”, they noted that understanding “the natural history” of a disease is important for medical treatment and indeed a major point in medical research, see e.g.: (97) 9 years, respectively. Clearly, continued evaluation of the living subjects in this study is essential to determine the natural history of non-A, non-B hepatitis more completely. Efforts in this study to identify factors that might predict progressi (98) l tests became available to distinguish hepatitis A and B from other forms of hepatitis (1,2). Early studies of the natural history of NANB hepatitis suggested that the illness generally followed a prolonged, indolent course that only rarely resulted I (99) ion (one patient), and other potential causes of chronic hepatitis (two patients)), which made it difficult to determine the natural history of the transfusion- associated disease. We therefore evaluated the remaining 90 patients. Serologic tests for ant (100) ew had advanced disease-a finding that supports our conclusion. Recent reports have more clearly defined the natural history of chronic hepatitis C. Alter et al. (30) reported that HCV viremia persists in most individuals with community-acquired (101) nce of retinopathy. The findings can be used to estimate the actual onset of NIDDM. Better understanding of the natural history of diabetes may facilitate the development of diabetes control strategies. A recent study estimated that the onset

The English “a history” seemed instead to be used when discussing the history of the illness of a single patient or a group of patients, and the students noticed that such descriptions are interesting in medical research articles in that they contribute to an improved description of the illness’s “natural history”. To talk about the single patients’ or groups of patients’ cases, in Italian, there seemed to be a more varied range of constructions. While in English structures including “history” seemed to be introduced by “patients” in most cases, (“patients with a history”, “patients who had a history”), in Italian, “storia” was also used to begin a sentence, (“La storia familiare e personale è del tutto normale” – the family and personal history is perfectly normal), as a title (“Storia riproduttiva” – Reproductive history) or in other introductive patterns (“si è inoltre vagliata la storia familiare” – the family history was also evaluated). The exploration of the two corpora, then, provided students with a lot of information about both medical contents and issues and language constructions. Contrasting patterns in English with patterns in their own language, students were encouraged to look better into concepts which seemed similar (and recurrent) in both sets of data (“the natural history” – “la storia natu-

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

rale”) and those which seemed different (“a history” – “la storia”). To check which were the matches in the two languages, the students explored those concepts and features of discourse that “a history” and “la storia” seemed to be related to. ... Comparing bilingual, small, medium and large corpora: More explorations involving “history” and “storia” In their search for “history” and “storia”, students noted two patterns which seemed odd or unfamiliar to their language intuition. The first was the Italian “con storia”, without an article, the second was the English “a history”, in particular “a” instead of “the”. They then decided to check whether these usages were common in general Italian /English or, as they thought, were characteristics of medical texts. To do this, they needed data from large corpora of general Italian/English. Unfortunately, while both the BNC sampler and the BNC world edition sounded suitable for research in English, no such general corpus of Italian language exists for the moment, and the students simply looked at two smallmedium corpora, one of Italian newspapers (500,000 words) and the other of Italian oral texts (the LIP corpus, De Mauro et al. 1993). They checked the word “storia” with “con” in a context of 3 words to the left. The search produced just 8 occurrences on the whole (4 from each corpus), 6 of “con la storia”, 1 of “con la nostra storia” and 1 of “con una storia”.3 None of “con storia”. While this suggested that the pattern “con storia” was probably not very widespread in the Italian language, the search could not be carried any further because of the lack of material.4 For English, by contrast, the BNC sampler produced 222 occurrences of “history”. Frequent left collocates were “in” (“one of the things that we learn very early in history is the Great Fire”, “In Germany most doctoral students in history make use of computers”), “the” (“the history of architecture”, “part of the history”) and possessives (“these fossils don’t rewrite our history but they do illustrate it usefully”). “A history” was not a frequent pattern, occurring 9 times altogether. In three cases (two from the same text), we have occurrences of “a long history” (“this union’s got a long history of amalgamations”). The remaining 6 are not easily classifiable, but one of them refers to a medical history: “his wife, aged 26, who had a history of mental illness”. A search in the entire BNC shows that history occurs 18,431 times. Analysis of 100 of them randomly selected basically confirms the results from the BNC sampler. Here also, occurrences of “a history” are rare (4). These four examples, however, help classify those from the BNC sampler. In particular, “a history”

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts 

seems to be used in two main patterns. The first has to do with descriptions of places (as in tourist guides): Price has a rich history The University of Edinburgh has a long and fascinating history The harbour town of Watchet has a history going back over a thousand years

The second with a patient’s history of some illness: his wife, aged 26, who had a history of mental illness seen in the context of a ten-year history of disturbed behaviour, these incidents could have been prevented

A check for the expression “a history” provided 820 occurrences in 481 texts. Analysis of 100 of them randomly selected showed that 30 of these referred to illnesses (e.g. “a history of diabetes mellitus”). In 14 cases, “a history” referred to descriptions of institutions or places, as in the examples above, 12 are inside book titles (e.g. “50th Cricket Week 1992: a history”), 16 are uses of history as an adjective (e.g. “a history degree”, “a history department”). In another 10 cases or so “a history” is used in legal contexts to refer to the history of criminals or convicts, in a very similar way to the one we noticed for the medical context, e.g. Some of the doormen had criminal convictions and a history of violence

In conclusion, “history” is not a word specific to one domain, whereas “a history” is much more restricted in its use, in this sense. Though not only a medical expression, and being found also in different contexts, its use suggests that it may have a preference for restricted contexts (tourist descriptions, medical descriptions of patients’ illnesses, criminal law descriptions).

. Interacting with “the authorities”: Completing or contrasting explanations from reference materials and the teacher The contrastive nature of corpus analysis is not limited to comparing different corpora and sets of concordances. It has probably been noticed, in the sections above, that an interesting feature of concordance data is that they are often profitably used by the students to contrast information derived form reference materials such as dictionaries or encyclopedias. This was noted in the case of

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

“Riba”, where the encyclopedia definition was compared and completed with information coming from the data, in the case of “bid”, where the dictionary entry was then re-interpreted in the light of concordance lines, and also in the case of “disorder”, where the dictionary’s suggestion about the semantic preference of “disorder” for mental/psychlogical contexts was made evident only after checking and comparing different sets of data. Wichmann (1995) too, notes that concordance analysis improves students’ semantic awareness, thus helping them deal with dictionary information better. In Chapter 2 (Section 2.4.4), quoting Johns (1994), I mentioned that one of the most interesting features of learner corpus work is that students observe things which often pass unnoticed to the teachers’ attention and that this fact promotes discussion of language features and conventions in the classroom, placing students and teacher “on an equal footing”. It seems that in deriving “their own” observations from concordance analysis, students are provided with something to compare or contrast with observations from different points of view, their classmates’, the teacher’s and also those given in reference materials. This is an important point because while language pedagogy in the 80s argued for the involvement of students in tasks where “authentic” communication could be somehow achieved, grammar classes remained a reality apart, with the teacher and/or the reference materials (books, cassettes, videoclips, dictionaries or whatever) inevitably playing the role of “the authority”. Concordances are interesting in this respect because, while they produce lexico-grammatical data, they produce data which are uninterpreted and awaiting interpretation. And while the data are (more or less) objective, interpretation (particularly by students who may not use scientifically rigorous methods) is subjective and can be profitably compared with other interpretations, data and reference. In this section, I discuss another example of a students’ exploration of corpora, this time involving a grammatical rather than a lexical problem: the use of the progressive form in medical research articles. Looking at the concordances, students produced data which not only made the teacher’s explanation clearer but also added something to it. .. The case of the progressive tense in medical research articles A feature of scientific writing that has been noticed in the literature (see Dudley-Evans & St. John 1998: 77–8 for a discussion) is a high lexical density due to the frequent use of noun phrases and other nominal forms. A particular case has been made with “-ing” forms which, have been found by Barber (1962, in Swales 1988) as rarely occurring as forms of continuous tense, and seem

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

to be more frequently used as constituents of noun phrases or of non-finite clauses (see Swales 1988: 12). In courses of technical-scientific translation, students are often introduced to the main features of academic texts as described in the literature. Having been told that medical texts are characterized by high lexical density and that “-ing” forms generally embody nominal forms rather than the progressive tense, students asked what that exactly meant. Some students also typed in a search for -ing forms in the concordancer and found several instances, raising curiosity about the problem. We then decided to look for “*ing” forms in the combined medical corpus and found 4411 occurrences. To answer the students’ question, as the corpora are untagged, occurrences had to be classified manually. The concordance was immediately edited to remove those occurrences which did not seem relevant for the analysis, such as “anything/nothing/something”, “morning”, “during” and other adverbial or connecting forms such as “according to”, “depending on”, “including/excluding”, “assuming”, “concerning”, “regarding”. This cut more than a thousand occurrences. The remaining occurrences were classified by the students and the teacher in three groups: nouns or noun phrases, nonfinite forms and progressive forms. On the whole, classification of the lines provided 1488 occurrences of nouns or noun phrases, 1728 of non-finite forms and 51 of progressive forms. While progressive forms were less frequent than the other forms (basically supporting the teacher’s initial explanation), there were, however, 51 occurrences, and students immediately focused on these. The occurrences suggested that the progressive form is actually not used frequently in this corpus and recurrent patterns often revealed idiosyncratic rather than more general medical uses, generally coming from a single text (e.g. “women were willing to pay more – 10 occurrences – all coming from a text dealing with the adequacy for public services in the treatment of breast cancer). Two patterns seemed to reveal more widespread use and attracted the students’ attention: “patients/subjects are/were awaiting (transplant/surgery/treatment)” (10 occurrences) and “patients/subjects were taking/receiving (drug)” (13 occurrences). None of them was however found to be recurrent in the other medical corpora at our disposal (the MCB medical book chapters and the research articles about stomach disease). The students then decided to leave the analysis aside for the moment. Noun forms, on the other hand, were found to be more interesting. While classifying three thousand items manually seemed a daunting task at first, students immediately realized that there were large blocks where lexical forms

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

were strongly associated with a single grammatical category. This, on the one hand, made classification easier and prevented the students from abandoning the task, and, on the other hand, it made them curious about the various patterns which seemed “interesting” in acquainting them better with the language of medicine. For instance, “finding” and “bleeding” appeared 43 and 42 times respectively in the corpus and in all cases as nouns. They also seemed to form pretty fixed collocations. In 27 out of 43 occurrences “finding” is preceded by “our”, “the” or “this”. In 15 cases “our/the/this finding” comes after a full stop, indicating the beginning of a new sentence and indeed suggesting a way to introduce what the finding was about. Other words which occurred only as nouns were “sampling” (forming the collocation “blood sampling”, 15 occ.), “worsening” (“worsening of (disease)” 7 occ.), and “writing” (“at this writing” in all 7 occurrences5 ). A variety of “-ing” words were then used as adjectives. Such are “underlying” (“underlying disease”, “underlying cause of death”, 21 occurrences), “threatening” (18 occurrences, 6 of which “life-threatening”), “existing” (16 occ., 11 of which “pre-existing”, generally collocating with therapy or disease), “ongoing” (10 occurrences). Among “-ing” words that appear in the corpus only as non-finite verbal forms, the most frequent was “using” (225) obviously collocating with methods (“using bootstrap methods”, “using an increment threshold technique”, “using multivariate analysis”) and “materials” (“using a Zeiss fundus camera”, “using a moving needle injector”); types of drugs and data also followed “using” in some cases (less than 5 each). A look on the left side of “using” also revealed a highly recurrent pattern, namely the colligation with the verb form “was/were analysed” (with variant forms for “analyse”: “assessed”, “estimated”, “calculated”, “compared”, “determined”, “evaluated”, “identified”, “measured”, “performed”, “carried out”). This made up more than 50 occurrences of “X was/were analysed (or a variant verb) using. . . ”. Besides “using”, non-finite forms also included “undergoing” (57 occurrences most of which in the collocation “[patients] undergoing [(type of) surgery]) and a variety of verbs that had to do with describing the experiment/the data: “determining”, “comparing”, “detecting”, “identifying”, “occurring”, “resulting” and with paper writing: “suggesting”, “showing”, “indicating”. A very interesting observation by the students regarded the verb “having” (121 occurrences, all non-finite verb forms). While students expected that the main pattern formed by the verb “having” was probably “(patients) having (disease)”, they rapidly discovered that a very frequent left collocate of “having” was not “patients” or “subjects”, but the preposition “as” (36 occurrences). A very frequent pattern with “having” was in fact “(patients) were

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

classified/diagnosed as having”. Indeed when a type of illness followed “having”, “were/was classified/diagnosed as” seemed to be systematically on the left of it. The collocation “patients/subjects having” was present in 25 cases and it was frequently followed by a symptom of the illness (6 occurrences; e.g. “having seizures”), a test (5 occurrences; e.g. “having mammography”), a surgery (5 occurrences; e.g. “having resection”). The remaining ones were not easily classifiable, but an illness (“tumour”) occurred in one instance only.6 Though rather complex and long, the search for “*ing” forms made the teacher’s explanation concrete for the students and it was then possible for them to discuss it. First, classifying the examples, they understood more precisely what was intended with nominal forms and non-finite verbs. Second, they added something to the teacher’s explanation, which was the fact that particular lexical forms often seemed to be attached to a single grammatical form (e.g. “finding” and “bleeding” which were only used as nouns or “using” and “having” which were only used in non-finite verb forms). Thirdly, they also partly contradicted it because, while it was true that progressive forms were less frequent than the other two and did not reveal any systematic pattern of usage, several progressive forms were found and some even suggested to the students ways to describe patients’ features (“were taking drugs”, “were awaiting surgery”). The classification of the examples had the aided value of telling the students a lot about tests, materials, drugs, illnesses and surgeries. Classifying the occurrences of both “using” and “having” where the colligating category seemed to be types of tests or types of illnesses, students learned to distinguish between them: indeed occasionally they decided they wanted to know more (for instance in the case of the “bootstrap methods”, which required reading a full section in a research paper about retinopathy, this was found to be a method for approximately estimating the duration of diabetes prior to clinical diagnosis). . Exploring corpora to produce texts In the sections above, we looked at students interacting with concordance materials to explore and discuss problems of a lexico-grammatical nature, mainly in the attempt to grasp concepts and issues that seemed to be recurrent in the specialized texts collected in the corpora. Those explorations emerged out of reading/writing activities such as summarizing, reformulating, editing or translating texts, especially in the foreign language. For these types of activities, in particular, concordance analysis seems to be an extremely useful resource

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

and there are a number of studies dealing with the usefulness of using corpus work with trainee translators or in reading/writing activities (see, e.g. Bowker & Pearson 2002: Chapters 10 and 11; Thompson 2002; Zanettin 2001; Maia 2000; Brodine 2001). As many of these studies demonstrate, corpus work helps students produce texts which sound natural in the foreign language and appropriate to the ESP register. So while on the one hand, corpus work has been considered a useful tool to produce good/better texts/translations in the foreign language and is interesting (and motivating for the students) in this respect, on the other, the process that is involved in producing such texts seems to me at least as interesting (see also Aston & Bertaccini 2001; Bernardini 2002b). In this section I show two examples of students’ activity which seem to me indicative of the type of work they get involved in. The two examples come from two different settings. The first concerns a student from a trainee translators’ course who is producing a translation of a medical abstract from Italian into English. The second involves a student from a European studies course producing a (written) speech about the European Monetary Union. As we shall see, the two examples are different in many respects, but they are both indicative of the way students explore the material, actually “getting their teeth” into it (Aston 2002). .. Translating a medical abstract7 While students generally carry out translations starting from the first sentence and then moving on, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, corpus-based findings often prompt them to “remanipulate” or edit the text in such a way that the structure of the original text gets heavily changed. This was the case of a student who translated an Italian abstract of a paper about hepatitis C using (mainly) a corpus of research papers about hepatitis C in English. His translation shows this attempt to re-formulate and clarify the concepts to make them fit for the English text. While his re-formulation may seem very “unfaithful” seen in a strictly translational perspective, from an ESP learning point of view it looks quite interesting. In Table 5 we can see the first two sentences of the Italian text, with a literal translation next to it. These two sentences introduce the purpose of the research and the data which were evaluated. As the first sentence seemed more difficult to understand and then translate, I suggested the student start from the second one. Having difficulty in dealing with the whole sentence altogether, the student began by translating the first part quite literally:

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

In this paper 183 hepatic biopsies of alcoholics with or without HBV markers were examined

He then decided to compare his sentence with the English corpus of hepatitis research papers. One of the key points in using a corpus of texts in English here is that the students have to know (or be able to guess) the potential English equivalent words or also use a dictionary to find them. Table 5. First sentences of the Italian source text and its literal translation Data la rilevanza epidemiologica dell’etilismo e delle infezioni da virus epatici è facile trovare pazienti in cui entrambe le etiologie sono presenti: in questa situazione è probabile che il rischio di evoluzione cirrogena sia maggiore. In questo lavoro sono state esaminate 183 biopsie epatiche di etilisti con o senza marcatori HBV e 104 etilisti (di cui 50 biopsiati) con o senza anti-HCV.

Given the epidemiologic relevance of alcoholism and of infections due to hepatic viruses, it is common to see patients in whom both illnesses are present: in this situation it is likely that the risk of evolution into cirrhosis increases. In this work, 183 hepatic biopsies of alcoholics with or without HBV markers were examined as well as 104 alcoholics (50 of which had liver biopsy) with or without HCV markers.

So a corpus (or at least this type of corpus) is not useful in the very first steps when the students are looking for word-to-word equivalents (e.g. “etilisti” – “alcoholics”); it does, however, help them see the way in which these words are constructed and contextualised. So our student first searched two specialized words in the sentence above, “biopsy” and “marker” to have a look at their context. For “biopsy*”, he noted that there were 47 occurrences of “liver biopsy” and none of “hepatic biopsy”. While “hepatic” occurred in other combinations as an adjective (mainly “hepatic failure” 14 out of 27 occurrences), as “liver” systematically occurred with “biopsy”, the student decided to change his “hepatic biopsy” chunk into “liver biopsy”. For “marker*”, he found one occurrence of “patients without hepatitis C markers” which attested the construction he chose for his translation. Through the concordance of “marker*”, though, he noted the repetition of the pattern “(to be) positive/negative for HBV/HCV markers”, an expression which, seemed to him, much better for clarifying his concept in the translation of the Italian text. On the basis of these observations, the student’s translation was then changed into: In this paper 183 liver biopsies of alcoholics who were positive or negative for HBV markers were examined

As this sentence comes early in the abstract text, being the second sentence, the student decided to have a look at the beginnings of the abstracts in his English

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

corpus, to see whether he could improve his text still further. Searching the word “abstract”, which is generally used as a title of the abstract text, he found just 3 abstract openings. In all of these 3 occurrences, the abstract started very abruptly immediately specifying the number of patients who were examined in the study, and providing no occurrences of “in this paper” as a starting phrase (as was the case in the students’ translation): 1. A series of 248 consecutive patients undergoing cardiac surgery were examined 2. Thirty patients who had not previous received treatment with factor VIII concentrate or who had been treated only infrequently with factor VIII [. . .] were studied 3. Five hundred and seventy-six consecutive patients from the surgical, obstetrical, and medical services who had received transfusions of volunteer blood were followed up As three occurrences were not many, the student searched the bigger corpus of research papers, finding 28 occurrences of the word “abstract” used as the title of the abstract section. Here too, “in this paper” did not occur as an opening phrase though there was an occurrence of “this report describes” and one of “this study was designed to test”. More frequent patterns in first sentences of abstracts could basically be classified into two groups: 1. those starting with an infinitive, e.g. “To clarify the viral factor . . .” 2. those starting with personal pronoun “we” followed by a verb such as “study” or “investigate” The first pattern was much more frequent and was used to introduce the purpose of the research (in 9 cases there was also a sub-title like “aims” or “objectives” introducing the first sentence of the abstract). The second pattern, introduced by “we”, occurred in a couple of cases in the first sentence of the abstract and once in the second sentence. However, as the sentence our student was concerned with did not seem to deal with the research purpose, he decided to use the latter pattern to introduce the number of patients examined in the study (“we analysed/examined + patients” accounted for 31 out of 480 occurrences of “we” in the 200,000 word medical corpus). The sentence was then changed into: We examined 183 liver biopsies of alcoholics who were positive or negative for HBV markers.

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

Findings about how abstracts begin led the student to look back at the first sentence in his source text. Having noted that abstracts often open by introducing the purpose of the medical research, the student used this information to establish a (not yet) clear connection between the first and the second sentence in his source text. The first sentence looked like a simple de-facto observation: Data la rilevanza epidemiologica dell’etilismo e delle infezioni da virus epatici è facile trovare pazienti in cui entrambe le etiologie sono presenti: in questa situazione è probabile che il rischio di evoluzione cirrogena sia maggiore. Given the epidemiologic relevance of alcoholism and of infections due to hepatic viruses, it is common to see patients in whom both illnesses are present: in this situation it is likely that the risk of evolution into cirrhosis increases.

The student, however, thought that this observation was probably there to introduce and explain the purpose of the research. He then re-interpreted the connection between the first two sentences of his source text as follows: as patients who are both alcoholics and have hepatitis seem more likely to get cirrhosis, this study checks whether this is true. In the light of this, he started interacting with concordances in the attempt to confirm his hypothesis about the text meaning and to reformulate it into English. A search of the word “alcoholism” in the hepatitis corpus provided 7 occurrences, two of which reassured the student that he had understood well. The second also suggested the expression “chronic alcoholism” which seemed to translate “etilismo” better: 1. The four patients in the IVDU group with high HAI scores (Fig. 1) had histories of alcohol abuse, and hepatitis C is worse when complicated by alcoholism (28, 29). Had we excluded these four cases from our study, the difference between the two groups would have been greater. 2. Another possibility is that chronic alcoholism may have augmented the deleterious effects of chronic non-A, non-B hepatitis in this study or, indeed, may have been entirely responsible for some of the deaths A search of the word “cirrhosis” provided 70 entries, 15 of which were occurrences of “development of/progress to cirrhosis”, suggesting that the topic of cirrhosis development may be a rather important one. The instance which attracted the student’s attention, though, was one of “risk factors for evolution to cirrhosis”, used as a title for a section in one of the papers included in the corpus. Reading such paper sections, the student found a confirmation that alcoholism was one.

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Exploring corpora for ESP learning

Table 6. Comparison of Italian source text, literal translation and student’s translation Italian source text

English literal translation

Student’s translation

Data la rilevanza epidemiologica dell’etilismo e delle infezioni da virus epatici è facile trovare pazienti in cui entrambe le etiologie sono presenti: in questa situazione è probabile che il rischio di evoluzione cirrogena sia maggiore. In questo lavoro sono state esaminate 183 biopsie epatiche di etilisti con o senza marcatori HBV e 104 etilisti (di cui 50 biopsiati) con o senza anti-HCV.

Given the epidemiologic relevance of alcoholism and of infections due to hepatic viruses, it is common to see patients in whom both illnesses are present: in this situation it is likely that the risk of evolution into cirrhosis increases. In this work, 183 hepatic biopsies of alcoholics with or without HBV markers were examined as well as 104 alcoholics (50 of which had liver biopsy) with or without HCV markers.

We have evaluated 104 patients with chronic alcoholism to assess the incidence of evolution to cirrhosis in the presence of both alcohol abuse and viral hepatitis. Anti HCV antibodies were not present in all cases and liver biopsies were performed in 50 patients (48%). In addition, we have examined 183 liver biopsies of alcoholics who were positive or negative for HBV markers.

In the light of this new data, the student produced a novel translation. It can be seen (Table 6) that in the attempt to make the link between the various bits of information and to create a coherent and cohesive text, the student “manipulated” it a lot: he changed the position of the various pieces of information and created three sentences instead of two. While these changes may probably raise doubts in a translation perspective,8 they seem to me interesting in an ESP learning one. The student’s text is, in my view, very clear in describing the contents and it is correct from the language point of view. In an attempt to produce an appropriate translation for this text, then, this student explored corpora not only to catch language patterns which could suitably be used in translation, but also to tease out concepts, meanings and information related to research on hepatitis. Looking at patterns which were frequent or recurrent, he constructed his own idea about which issues were relevant in order to understand the source text better. .. Writing out a political speech The second exploration I show here comes from a different teaching context, that of undergraduates in European languages and cultures, a university degree aimed at training students to deal with economics, business and politics inside the European institutions. A task these students are often asked to perform

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

in their language courses is that of preparing oral presentations dealing with issues related to European economics and politics. The course was first taken in academic year 2000–2001, a period of major European debate about the introduction of the common currency. The topic of the Euro seemed to meet the interest of my students in this course so I collected a corpus of speeches about the introduction of the Euro as a single European currency (120,000 words, 41 texts). As we did not know beforehand exactly which might be interesting features in these texts, I first gave them three printed speeches, randomly chosen, and asked them in groups to compare the texts and look for common features. The students noted that there were very similar ways to open and close the speeches, namely by using the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen” (e.g. “ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great honour for me to be invited” or “ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention”). They also noted a widespread use of percentages and quantitative data referring to banknotes and coins. As there seemed not much else the students noticed in these texts, I gave them a list of words generated from a comparison between the speeches corpus and the BNC oral component, using Wordsmith’s keywords feature. This feature allows you to compare two corpora and generates a list of those words which show up as occurring in statistically significant quantities in the first corpus (see Section 1.5). To give an idea of the type of data we got, in Table 7 below, I show the list of the 20 most significant words in the speeches corpus, as compared to the BNC oral component. I asked the students to look at the first 100 words in the list (two printed pages) and to group them according to any semantic similarity they noted. The students observed that the majority of words had to do with European economy and policy (Euro, Monetary, Economic, Currency, ECB (European Central Table 7. Keywords of EMU speeches corpus (88,000 words) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

EURO MONETARY THE ECONOMIC STABILITY OF GROWTH CURRENCY ECB AREA

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

EUROPEAN POLICY MARKETS COUNTRIES FINANCIAL PRICE INFLATION IN BIS EMU

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

Bank), Area, European, Policy, Markets, Countries, Financial, Price, Inflation, EMU (European Monetary Union), etc.). Others seemed to form a group of words “with a positive meaning”, namely: Stability, Growth, Developments, Integration, Convergence. Students noted that while there was a group of “positive” words, “negative” ones did not seem to show up in this list, the most negative being “risks”. This observation gave a group of students the input to check whether “negative” words were used at all in this corpus. Here, I deal particularly with the searches and explorations performed by this group and I discuss the speech they eventually produced. As in Section 6.5.1, above, this is however just one example; other groups of students produced speeches following different paths and performing different types of explorations. Together, the students in this group made their own list of “negative words” from the corpus frequency word list; these included “problem”, “threat” (verb and noun), “danger”, “difficulty” and “failure”. “Threat”, “Danger”, “difficulty” and “failure” showed a very small number of occurrences, 12 of “threat*”, 9 of “danger*”, 4 of “difficulty” and 4 of “failure”. It was noted that not only were these words rare, but the context in which they appeared seemed to somehow mitigate their negative meaning. This is evident in the following 6 instances from the “danger*” concordance: (1) create conditions for the international economy that minimise misalignments in asset prices, excessive volatility, purely speculative phenomena and dangerous herd behaviour. This is the underlying message in central banks’ repeated calls for prudence and caution. Nothing is more conducive to eco (2) ned prospects for strong economic growth in the euro area, the protracted rise in import price inflation in the past few months clearly gave rise to a greater danger of a spillover to domestic sources of inflation, such as, for instance, firms aiming at raising or restoring profit margins. These risks had to be counteracted (3) interest rate moves are providing a clear signal to market participants, social partners and policymakers that the ECB is determined to counter inflationary dangers in a timely fashion, and that the prospects for price stability in the euro area remain good. This is also of great importance for the longer-term pot (4) macroeconomic outcome, still less a benchmark for expectations. It should be absolutely clear, in fact, that the Council is always ready to act to fend off dangers to price stability that might emerge from whatever source of evidence, be it model-based econometric exercises or more specific assessments (5) Central Bank is acutely conscious of this threat and it has in place arrangements to respond effectively and in a co-ordinated manner to any such danger, should counterfeiters seek to take advantage of the unique situation. As a precaution, the information campaign on the security features

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

(6) al integration will have to be founded on a stable currency and sound, successful economy. Hence, the quest for more integration will have to eschew the danger of creating “political cartels,” which would be as detrimental to Europe’s economy and society, as business cartels are to market activities. Heal

A search for “problem*” instead provided 49 occurrences. Even here, “problem” occurred in contexts which seemed to mitigate its negative meaning:. For instance, in 8 cases, it was found in negative constructions (“not a problem”) and in 6 cases in constructions referring to possibility (“potential problem”, “if this problem arose”). Looking at the extended context of the concordance of “problem*”, then, students noted that in 20 cases or so “problems” were “solved” or “resolved”, “addressed”, “managed”, “dealt with” or “identified”. By looking at these instances, students had the impression that a common topic in these speeches was that of reassuring the hearers that “problems were under control”. This is particularly clear in the following instance, taken as an example of the types of occurrences the students found: All the problems and risks I have mentioned were essentially wellrecognised and thoroughly discussed before the EMU was formed. Various rules were therefore constructed to prevent what is called destructive diversity.

To confirm this hypothesis, they also checked the concordance of what intuitively seemed to them the “most negative” word they found in the keywords list, the word “risk”, singular and plural.9 Similarly to “problems”, “risk/s” seemed to be systematically mitigated. Of 157 occurrences of “risk*”, we have 20 of the patterns “risk management tools/techniques” (15) and “value-at-risk” (5), two strategies to manage and control risk. In about 10 cases, “risk” occurs in a negative or comparative pattern of the type “no risk” or “less risk”. In 95 cases “risk*” co-occurs with verbs that belong to the semantic field of assessment, control and counteraction of risks, e.g. “analyse”, “signal”, “assess”, “monitor”, “evaluate”, “diversify”, “hedge”, “contain”, “bear”, “minimize”, “remove”, “reduce”, “react”, “counteract”, “avoid”. By exploring recurrent patterns connected with the mitigation of risks and problems, the students gained awareness of some recurrent issues in such speeches, which they isolated as: – – –

descriptions of the changeover period (from national currencies to the EURO) response of citizens in the various countries to the changeover risks, primarily related to inflation

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

Table 8. Comparison between student’s first draft and edited text Students’ first draft

Students’ edited text

Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a great pleasure for me to be invited to the annual conference of the European Central Bank and to speak to such a distinguished audience. The subject of the Euro changeover has been the central problem to face during the last year but now the changeover period has finised and we should confess that it went better than hoped: 90% of national banknotes and 75% of national coins have been replaced by the Euro, our new unique currency. The material production of the currency and its distribution in the twelve countries of the EMU might have been considered as potential risk for the changeover but now we can say that all the European countries have overcome this problem in an effective way. Moreover, let me say that the citizens of the Union have responded enthusiastically to the new currency, expressing their trust in the European and national authorities to solve all the future problems.

Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a great pleasure for me to be invited to the annual conference of the European Central Bank and to speak to such a distinguished audience. The subject of the Euro-cash changeover has been the central problem to face during the last year but now that it has been accomplished I must say that it went better than hoped: 90% of national banknotes and 75% of national coins have been replaced by the Euro, our new unique currency.

Another subject that must be taken into account is the fact that there could be some inflationary risks due to the conversion of the prices. On this point we should remember that it might represent a threat for economic stability only in the short period, because after an initial period of transition the prices will start to decrease thanks to the easiness to compare the prices all over the EMU countries. These factors could become threatening only if the national governments fail to fulfil the Maastricht convergence criteria: as a consequence, they would put at risk the entire European Monetary Union and create problems on an international plan. Therefore, all the coutries should try to reduce the inflation risks but also to face the problem of speculation due to the Euro-conversion. This would be the only way to create a stable Union that could be competitive with the Dollar and the Yen. Furthermore, let me remind you of the brilliant siccesses that we have achieved up to now, starting from the general satisfaction of the European citizens with the new currency but also the increasing competitive power that our money is gaining all over the world.

The material production of the currency and its distribution in the twelve countries of the EMU might have been considered as potential risks for the changeover, from an organizational and logistical point of view, but now we must say that all the European countries have overcome this difficulty in an effective way. Moreover, let me say that the citizens of the Union have responded very positively to the new currency, expressing their trust in the European and national authorities to solve all the future problems. Another subject that must be taken into account is the fact that there could be some inflationary risks due to the conversion of the prices. On this point we should remember that it might represent a threat for economic stability only over a relatively short period of time. After an initial period of transition the prices will start to lower, because we will be able to compare the prices allover the EMU countries easily. These factors could become threatening only if the national governments fail to fulfil the Maastricht convergence criteria: as a consequence, they would put at risk the entire European Monetary Union and create problems on an international plan. Therefore, all the coutries should try to reduce the inflation risks but also to face the problem of speculation due to the Euro-conversion. This would be the only way to create a stable Union that could be competitive with the Dollar and the Yen. Furthermore, let me remind you of the brilliant siccesses that we have achieved up to now, starting from the general satisfaction of the European citizens with the new currency but also the increasing competitive power that our money is gaining all over the world.

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

On the basis of this list of issues, they wrote a draft for a speech about the introduction of the European currency. They then checked their draft against the corpus of speeches in the attempt to see whether some language constructs they used were in fact found (and maybe expressed in more convincing ways) in the corpus. This led to re-editing the text and to more exploration. In Table 8 I show the speech produced by the students in the draft and in the edited form (changes operated during editing are underlined). While the text produced by the students is not particularly dense in contents and probably not “perfect” from the language point of view, it does show some familiarity the students achieved with lexis, topics and functions connected with this type of specialized text. What seems particularly interesting in the students’ text is the promotional, “consoling” function which emerged quite strikingly in the analysis of the corpus and which the students succeeded in reproducing. Looking at and interpreting the recurrent combinations of some keywords (such as “risk”) or non-keywords (such as “problem” or “danger”), students were involved in an exploration of the way these speeches conventionally achieve meaning and, using these conventions, were able to reproduce a new meaningful text.

. Conclusion: From spies to “double-agents”? It seems to me that the examples of learners’ work shown above provide a pretty clear idea about how students interact with concordance material from specialized text corpora to grasp meanings and issues related to the specialized world of knowledge and how they manipulate it to produce novel texts. As discussed in Chapter 2, the corpus methodological approach reveals that language combinations are very frequently based on conventions of usage rather than rules of a logico-rationalistic type. This, as we have seen, provokes a change of perspective in the approach to the study of language, which Sinclair (1991, 1996) calls “the idiom principle”. The idiom principle, or the idiom perspective affects the way we conceive and interpret how meaning is produced and understood (see Tognini Bonelli 2001: 157–164 and also Tognini Bonelli 2000). Learners performing corpus work establish contact with the idiom perspective and develop an increasing sensitivity to observing patterns of language which are of a conventional type, patterns that are such because they are “socially-stipulated”, as Glucksberg (1993) puts it, rather than rationalistically generated, and identifying and learning recurrent patterns becomes central to the entire language learning process (Aston 1995). By exploring corpora

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

of specialized texts the students are led to observe those conventions which are stipulated inside the discourse community producing those texts. Concordances, however, do not “describe” such conventions, they just provide clues to them. By interpreting concordancing materials, then, students match those clues and attribute a sense to them. By this process they are introduced to the world of meaning and knowledge entailed in the specialized texts and they become participants in the discourse of the specialized community. In this way the “spy” process may eventually lead the students to assimilate the specialized community’s issues, problems and discourse conventions. Quoting Swales again (1990: 29–32) if spies assimilate the issues and conventions of the discourse community they have infiltrated, they cease to be single spies and become “double-agents”. This “double-agent” action is, I believe, clearly visible in both the medical translation and the political speech written by the students with the aid of corpora and shown in Sections 6.5.1 and 6.5.2. above. By observing recurrent structures and patterns in the specialized texts they were analyzing, students became aware of relevant issues and ways to construct meaning in such texts. In other words they combined what is typically said with how it is said, and this allowed them to re-structure their knowledge of the specialized discipline “world” (Bernardini 2000a: 17–18). Such re-structuring allowed the students to become participants, manipulate the texts and produce new ones. In this sense, corpus work favours students’ self-expression in the framework of the schematic convention of the discourse community. For these reasons, I believe that work with corpora facilitates the students’ achievement of the discourse community membership. A completely open issue, however, would be how far the achievement of discourse community membership leads the learner to “assimilate” the discourse community knowledge and conventions or, in other words, how far the “doubleagent” can remain “double” rather than becoming a “fully” assimilated new individual. While it seems to me that grasping the concepts and conventions of a discourse community is essential if one is to participate in its communicative activity, it is not easy to say whether this gives more constraints or more autonomy to language learners and whether their re-structuring actually allows them to view their process of assimilation critically. I shall come back to this issue in Chapter 7 below; for the moment let me just point out that this is, I think, a pedagogic problem worth considering for potential corpus-work contributions to language learning.

Chapter 6. Learners exploring corpora to observe and produce texts

Notes . This partly depends on the ESP teaching context and a class involving e.g. business professionals may be interested in very different types of items as compared to e.g. a class of undergraduates. . On the whole, the occurrences of RIBA in the BNC are in fact 243 in 39 texts; only in these 13 cases, however, does it refer to the medical acronym, the remaining ones being abbreviations of the “Royal Institute of British Architects”. . These are the instances: 1. Questa sociologia astratta ha una relazione intrinsecamente precaria con la storia. (This abstract sociology has an intrinsically precarious relationship with the history). 2. Il mito [. . .] passa a convivere con le vicende, con la storia (Myth gets to co-exist with real events, with the history). 3. Frantisek Cerny si trova a dover fare i conti con la storia (F.C. has to come to terms with history). 4. Un organismo agonizzante [. . .] con una storia tutt’ altro che commendevole. (An agonising organism, with anything but a praiseworthy history). 5. Volevo proprio cominciare con la storia (I wanted to start precisely from history). 6. Una costruzione totalmente fantastica che non vuole avere non ha nulla a che vedere con la storia reale (A totally imaginary narrative which has nothing to do with the real story). 7. Per collegare questi testi con la la storia della letteratura (In order to connect these texts with the history of literature). 8. Come movimento operaio con la nostra storia dobbiamo dare un contributo fondamentale (As a working union, with our history, we have to provide our fundamental contribution). . A search in a large corpus of Italian newspaper texts (over 100 million words from La Repubblica, see Baroni et al. 2004) seemed to confirm the data from the small corpora. The pattern “con storia” occurs only 16 times: 10 are occurrences where a book or a film title is introduced (e.g. “Il cinema Italia è stato inaugurato mercoledì con Storia di ragazzi e ragazze di Pupi Avati” / “Cinema Italia was inaugurated last Wednesday with Storia di ragazzi e ragazze, director Pupi Avati”). In 4 instances “con storia” occurs as the first item of a series of characteristics peculiar to a country or culture (e.g. “paesi con storia e cultura differenti da quella russa” / “nations with a history and a culture different from the Russian one”). The remaining two are: “le casistiche vaste e frantumate discusse con storia e filosofia su molti giornali” and “Staatsgesichte che noi traduciamo con storia politica” (“huge and puzzling data which are discussed with an amount of historical and philosophical details in many newspapers”; “Staatsgesichte which we translate as political history”). . Though in the case of “writing” distribution is on just 3 articles (from different domains). . The findings about “having” were not confirmed by the MCB medical corpus (book chapters), but they were very much so in the stomach disease corpus (research articles) where of 24 occurrences of “having”, 15 were “as having” and 9 “diagnosed as having”, sug-

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

gesting that this pattern may be frequent in research articles where evaluation of patients’ illnesses is a research problem. . The students I wish to thank: Alessio Armandi, Silvia Rossi, Elena Ruozzi. . This example has been discussed from a closer translational perspective in Gavioli and Zanettin (2000). . “Risks” occurring at position 68, “risk” at position 124, with 77 and 75 instances respectively.

Chapter 7

Concluding remarks

. Three answers? In the second chapter of this book (2.4.1), I discussed the Data-Driven Learning approach, highlighting the change of perspective that it introduced in corpus work with/in the classroom. Johns (1994) made it clear that students could actually have a direct access to corpus data, concordances in particular, and that they could be invited to carry out their own language researches autonomously. I noted that this opened up a new series of enquiries and questions and I focused on three main ones. Here, I get back to these questions in an attempt to provide, at least, some preliminary answers. .. If learners are to behave as data analysts, what should be the role of the teacher? This first question has to do with one of Johns’ (1994: 297) claims, namely that the Data Driven Learning attempts to cut out the “middlemen” as far as possible. Data Driven Learning in fact pursued the aim of leading students to analyse the data directly, with little filtering from materials designers or teachers. This opened up questions about the role of the teacher in the classroom. On the one hand, there is a problem of introducing the students gradually to the material in such a way that they can actually “see something in it” while avoid being overwhelmed by too much information; on the other, we also want them to achieve more and more autonomy as this is crucial if actual learning is to take place. The problem of leading students from maximum guidance to maximum independence is not a new one in language teaching/learning (see e.g. Breen 1987; Prabhu 1987; Nunan 1992; Benson & Voller 1997) and many issues raised in the debate about autonomy in language learning could equally be discussed in reference to corpus work and learners’ guidance/autonomy. As mentioned at various points in this book, what seems interesting to me in corpus work is

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

that concordance data provide a source of uninterpreted material, on the basis of which teachers and/or learners (and/or researchers) can carry out their own interpretations. The “puzzle” that the data create puts teachers and learners on essentially “the same ground”. This provides teachers and learners with an occasion to collaborate in identifying information emerging from the data, as well as to negotiate the output. The function of negotiation in teacher-learner interaction (also including learner-resource and learner-learner interaction) is considered central in the development of learners’ autonomy (Voller 1997: 109). As seen in Chapter 6, concordance-based interaction involves discussion within groups of learners and with the teacher; such discussion involves negotiation both in interpreting the meanings and usages of words and structures highlighted in the concordance and in making it clear in what way these words and structures “matter to me (the analyst) here”. Quoting Boud (1988), Voller (1997) distinguishes between three types of approaches in achieving teacher-learner negotiation: the individual one focusing on individual learners and their needs; the group-centered one characterized by group interaction and decision-making; and the project-centred one requiring collaboration and negotiation to attain to a common outcome. Having direct access to concordance data, learners can either negotiate their own individual, group or project requirements in, for instance, defining a suitable corpus for their own writing/translating/professional activity (see 5.3), finding words or patterns expressing what they want to say or write (see 6.5), or grasping the meaning of (technical) concepts (see 6.2). While it seems to me that teacher-learner (as well as learner-learner) negotiation can hardly be pre-defined and pre-directed in any way and it is then up to the teacher to design the way in which such negotiations may be enhanced in their own settings, what I have attempted to do in this book was to focus on issues that may be interesting for teachers to take into account in their own designs and projects. In Chapters 3 and 4, in particular, I pointed out theoretical issues such as the idiomatic view of language that corpus work entails and the types of conventions that are highlighted in specialized corpus-work as well as methods of exploring specialized corpora, and, in Chapters 5 and 6, I showed ways in which learners can be made familiar with such issues and tackle them in their own work. Work on corpora as presented in Chapter 6 shows that the “middleman” is not very much in the middle and that learners carry out their own searches quite independently. The teacher, however, takes the role of a guide in introducing the data to the learners, in showing ways to “read” the data and make sense out of them, in suggesting comparisons with more data, and in

Chapter 7. Concluding remarks 

providing interpretations which the students can discuss and contrast. This leads to teacher-student discussion and negotiation and promotes students’ participation in the interaction. .. Learners or researchers? A second suggestion by Johns (1994) which follows from the one above is that learners can perform corpus work as language researchers and can be treated as such. His argument is that language research is too serious to be left to researchers and that the language learning process is itself a research process. There are obviously differences between learners and researchers in mastery of the language they are dealing with, in their meta-linguistic knowledge and, last but not least, in the purposes they want to achieve with their searches. For these reasons many metaphors, such as that of the traveller or the spy, have been used here and elsewhere (e.g. Bernardini 2000a; Tan 2002a) to distinguish between the search work of learners and that of researchers. Here (Section 6.1), I suggested that the “spy” metaphor seems particularly suitable to describe the exploration of corpora for ESP learning as it takes the aims and purposes of the exploration into closer account and because it seems to provide a “bridge” between discourse community insiders and outsiders, thus indicating a direction through which students may be conducted if they want to become familiar with the discourse community’s knowledge and conventions. It is true, though, that all metaphors seem somehow reductive when it comes to describing the analytic processes of learners, researchers or (possibly) other categories of analysts. While comparing the work of learners and researchers performing corpus work (as well as comparing that of native and non-native speakers, Sripicharn 2004) is useful in helping one understand better the process the learners go through in carrying out their analyses, individuals follow their own interpretative paths in reading the data and we can probably imagine that they can all have occasions to be “researchers”, “travellers”, “spies” or “explorers”. The shift suggested in Johns’ metaphor (1991) was that of focusing the applied linguist’s attention on the process of learners using corpora rather than the product of corpus research. This process is of an interpretative nature and can be extremely rich and fruitful; precisely for this reason, it can hardly be depicted by a single metaphor. While analytic processes are probably too fuzzy to be clear-cut, learners’ and researchers’ premises and goals are obviously distinct and this is probably where the “researcher” metaphor created confusion. Comparing learners to researchers in fact may suggest that students get burdened with the weight

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

of language description and leads one to ask why students should bother with long and risky searches when grammars and dictionaries (to quote just two examples of descriptive learner materials) provide results more quickly and reliably (Kennedy 2004). In this respect, creating a close link between the work of learners and that of researchers probably contributed to increasing the confusion between what, in corpus linguistics, can be considered scientifically interesting, on the one hand, and what can be considered pedagogically useful, on the other (Kennedy 1992, see 2.2 above). I hope that the learners’ searches that I showed in Chapter 6 make it clear that the types of enquiries made by the students have very different goals as compared to those of researchers and while (similarly to researchers’ queries) they sometimes emerge out of a lack in the reference materials (e.g. in the case of grasping the meanings of particular words) they are carried out to the extent to which they answer a local (individual, group or project) problem. Cases where students compare their analyses of concordances with, e.g., dictionary descriptions are very clear in this respect. Dictionaries (even corpus-based ones) attempt to provide comprehensive descriptions of words’ meanings and usages and precisely because the description has to be comprehensive to fit multiple needs, it may fail to provide that (possibly little) information which is relevant for the individual to attach it to her/his own reality (see for instance the example of “bid” in 6.2.2 above or Gavioli & Aston 2001: 241). It seems necessary, then, to distinguish clearly between the goals of learners (such as those shown in Chapter 6 above) and the goals of researchers (such as that of producing reference materials, as in the example above). The difference in the goals of researchers and learners is important because it affects the outcomes they achieve. In the case of researchers this is clearly in terms of their “jobs”, which may be that of contributing to linguistic debates or to the work of the language industry (e.g. materials’ design). In the case of learners the outcome is of a completely different kind. Here (Section 6.6), I described it by using (again) a metaphor, that of the “double-agent”, suggested by Swales (1990: 30). In his discussion of the potential relevance of fabricated examples in language teaching/learning, Cook (2001) suggests that examples take on a communicative value insofar as they are part of teacher-learner interaction. They are “real” in the classroom context as they communicate a point that is being made by the participants in the interaction. Similarly, interpretations of concordance lines lead the students to interact with the material making language patterns (recurrent or “deviant” ones) real or memorable to them. In this way, (ESP) learners interpret text produced inside the (English speaking)

Chapter 7. Concluding remarks

discourse community. Learners are then led to interact with the main concepts and conventions which are revealed in the texts. The interaction process makes the students familiar with such concepts and conventions, which they can eventually assimilate. The gradual process of assimilation may turn them into “double-agents”, capable of participating in the communicative processes of the discourse community. This seems to me a distinctive outcome characterizing language learners, ESP learners in particular. Here I have repeatedly suggested that the process of learning through corpus work can probably be extended to EGP as well, at least in that EGP can also include “semi-specialised” texts and settings (e.g. writing purchase messages/letters, listening to the business news and the like). It would be interesting, though, to see whether corpus-work in EGP settings helps favour a “double-agent” attitude not only across discourse communities but also across speech communities. This, I suggest, is a matter very much worth enquiring into. .. Is the effort a worthwhile one? The answer to this question is probably the hardest one to give. In this book I have suggested that corpus work can enrich the language learning environment in many ways. Working with corpora, ESP students become familiar with a productive idea of idiomatic language features, they learn to use and adapt language patterns to their own needs, they interact with the material to make meanings “real” to them (as well as the world of knowledge that such meanings and concepts may entail) and they interact with teachers and peers in debating different interpretations of the data. All this, I believe, makes the effort a worthwhile one. The effort, though, is still great and, paradoxically, the progresses and expansions of corpus linguistics in recent years have made it still greater. If corpus linguistics has avoided overwhelming students with too much material, for the time being, the risk of its overwhelming teachers is an equally serious one (Aston 2004). As mentioned at the beginning of this book, in the teaching environment, suggestions have included, among others, uses of corpora for EGP or ESP syllabus design, enquiries into the features of learner English, design of corpus-based teaching materials (reference or otherwise), the use of the concordancer as a teacher or learner or teacher-and-learner tool; while Hunston (2002: Chs. 6–8), for instance, contains a very interesting overview of the many possibilities that corpora offer. All of these fields, however, open up new questions and implications for language pedagogy and it is not easy for language

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

teachers to see precisely how all this regards them (and, in this respect, I find that suggestions contained in Renouf 1997 are still pertinent). As fields of research have opened up and developed, more and more corpora have been made available to fit their requirements and together with the general and specialised corpora I have mentioned in this book, we now have corpora representing varieties of English (e.g. ICE project, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice/), corpora of teen-ager language (COLT, http://torvald.aksis.uib.no/colt/) and the above cited Micase (http://www.lsa. umich.edu/eli/micase/micase.htm), a corpus of academic spoken English, to quote just a few which may be interesting to deal with in a teaching/learning environment. In addition to the bulk and variety of corpora, we also have a variety of concordancing software, so that, at the time of writing, it is hardly possible to compare concordance lines from a specialized and a general corpus without using two different tools. While all this obviously constitutes an enrichment in the possibilities that open up to teachers and learners, finding the path to actually understand what might be useful in their local teaching environments may be a daunting task for individual teachers. One thing that I have noted (Section 5.3.2) working with students, was that it is much easier, if not essential to them, to have their own corpus to analyze. This is probably true for most analysts and thus for teachers as well. In order to be able to create a corpus, though, analysts need first to be fairly closely acquainted with what a corpus is, and second to understand precisely which type of corpus may fit their needs. In Section 5.3, I suggested that “proposing” a corpus of business language and working with it made students aware of both the advantages and limits of that corpus, which, in its turn, made clear to them which type of corpus they actually needed and eventually built up. This task suggested that the classroom itself can be a very rich source of corpus production, both in terms of actually assembling the material and in terms of suggestions that can be provided for corpora implementation for the classroom. First, the corpora that the students assembled contained texts which were immediately relevant for their own writing or translation projects. Moreover, these corpora could be combined to form larger data-sets or compared to contrast results from texts produced in different types of business settings. Second, if “suitable” ad hoc corpora are actually produced inside the classroom, materials’ production outside the classroom should probably concentrate more on “reference corpora” to use as comparative data rather than attempting to create ad hoc corpora for each individual occasion. So using corpora with learners can actually provide more precise directions for the implementation of the (types of) tools that may be required in the

Chapter 7. Concluding remarks

classroom context. However, as learners’ corpus work is not so widespread few suggestions can be collected. To break this vicious circle and make the effort of teachers and learners less burdening and more attractive, it seems to me that a cheap, small and easy package may well be a preliminary solution. For ESP, this might simply include some specialized corpora (e.g. of the type constituting MicroConcord Corpus B) and a general reference medium size corpus (e.g. 10 million words, half spoken, half written), both searchable with the same software. To the best of my knowledge, an attempt in this direction has only been made by Scott and Johns (1993; see Murison-Bowie 1993a), and with the ICAME corpus collection, a CD containing a concordancer (Wordsmith Tools, Scott 1998) and some available corpora of English language, none specialized (see http://nora.hd.uib.no/icame/newcd.htm).

. Corpus work and pedagogy: Old or new questions? In Chapter 2 (Section 2.1.2), I summarized Kennedy (1992) and Aston (2001a), providing a series of reasons which have prevented corpus work from getting smoothly introduced in language pedagogy: poor communication between teachers and researchers; a confusion between what is scientifically interesting and what is pedagogically useful; a focus of language pedagogy on the learning process rather than the learning product and lack of materials’ accessibility. At this point, we are probably in a position to add one more, namely a confusion between what are “old” and “new” pedagogic questions. In other words, while corpus work has obviously introduced new issues that should be dealt with by teachers and learners, these new issues are probably to be seen in relation to old issues and a way should be found to integrate the two. Guiding the learners to achieve autonomy in language learning, for instance, is certainly not a new issue in language pedagogy; the question is how this can be done with corpus work and, at the same time, how corpus work may give a contribution in this direction. In the years I worked with corpora and students I often found myself caught in this dilemma as it was not always easy to distinguish whether students failed to appreciate corpus work because it was technically or conceptually difficult or because I failed to create conditions to make it relevant for them. In this book, I have suggested types of searches which were found useful by the students and which led to ample discussion of and interaction with the data. These, I think, provide examples for “new” issues to be brought to the class. Creating conditions to start these searches, though, was largely a mat-

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

ter of “old” pedagogic questions. Teacher’s decisions included grading items, choosing the materials, managing classroom interaction and the problem of achieving learners’ autonomy as mentioned above. All these problems deserve, I believe, closer discussion and experiential or experimental research. As regards grading, for instance, here I have suggested that a small corpus of similar texts makes the data easier to interpret because concordance lines are not excessive and repetition may be easier to observe. While this is obviously true in an ESP approach, it may be that nonESP approaches favour other ways to “facilitate” the reading of the data, such as pre-editing or selecting concordance lines, or teaching students to edit and select the data. Working with specialized corpora, the choice of a “suitable” corpus for or by the students was carried out considering the students’ potential interests and then negotiating that choice with them, as shown in 5.3. This, however, involved (and may involve) a series of issues which are generalizable to the whole problem of the choice of teaching/learning materials. These involved decisions made on the topics selected, on the inclusion of native, non-native or other varieties of English language, of “hard” specialized texts (such as texts from research journals) vs. “softer” ones (such as popularized literature). These “old” questions, then, need to be addressed when proposing corpuswork to the learners. In this book I have suggested some ways in which corpora contribute to traditional ESP (and sometimes EGP) teaching/learning problems, but obviously much more remains to be done. While recent research has focused on the identification of a large number of settings that may take profit from corpus work with a subsequent implementation of more and more materials to meet their requirements, it seems to me that the time is ripe to get back to questions which probably emerged too early in the debate on corpora and language pedagogy and which have to do with the contribution of corpus work to this research field. I suggest that the distinction between such “old” and “new” questions, as it emerged from the work of learners discussed in this book, may indicate a path in this direction.

. Future developments Given the wealth of pedagogic issues that corpus linguistics has raised for language teaching and learning, imaginable future developments are certainly many more than those I can summarize here. In this section I shall limit myself to dealing with some points which, it seems to me, have emerged as more and

Chapter 7. Concluding remarks

more relevant through the years I have carried out corpus work with learners. I shall focus on those problems which have more directly to do with ESP, rather than general English teaching and learning, even though some are inevitably shared by both ESP and EGP. .. Tools and teaching materials In Section 7.1.3, above, I have been dealing with the problem of making corpora and concordancing software available for teachers and learners and, in particular, I have argued for the need to organize the information about the materials’ availability in a way that is accessible to teachers (and learners) without overwhelming them. In this respect, some web pages have constituted a very useful resource of papers and materials to start with. Two of these were Tim Johns’ and Michael Barlow’s respective web pages (now available at http://www.eisu.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/index.html and http://www.athel.com/corpus.html; see also David Lee’s http://devoted.to/ corpora). No such resource has, to the best of my knowledge, been developed for the teaching and learning of ESP, at the moment, and this may well constitute a task for the future. As far as corpora are concerned, as shown above, teachers and learners can produce their own ad hoc corpora without which it is hard for them to “get into” corpus work. This has two potential implications for tools and materials’ achievement. The first is that production of corpora for teaching/learning settings should probably concentrate on reference corpora. In the ESP area, the Micase probably constitutes the only available specialized reference corpus and representative corpora of medical and business English may constitute useful reference material for the ESP classroom (see also Laviosa 2001). A recent implementation which seems to constitute a contribution in this direction is that of the BNC-baby. This is a four million subset of the British National Corpus developed at Oxford (Berglund et al. 2004). It consists of four 1-million sets, containing unscripted conversation, newspapers, written fiction and, notably, academic prose. The second implication is that as the World Wide Web is becoming larger and larger, on the one hand it offers learners and teachers more and more possibilities to create their own ad hoc corpora, on the other searching the Web for ad hoc texts has become an increasingly difficult and time consuming task, with the consequence that students (and teachers) get discouraged throughout the operation and may eventually give up. Work on helping students search the web for specialized ad hoc texts would be, in my opinion, extremely useful to

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

improve corpus use in the classroom. At the moment of this writing and to the best of my knowledge, the only tool implemented to facilitate the creation of corpora by searching the Web is BootCaT (Baroni & Bernardini 2004) and while corpus building has been recognized to be a potentially important learning activity for students, there is still little systematic work on how to guide them through this task (but see Fletcher 2004 and also Pearson 2000). .. Corpus-based dictionaries and learners One simple and interesting way in which students can compare their own corpus-based findings with larger and more general data, is by using a corpusbased dictionary as reference. Corpus-based dictionary entries constitute a very useful reference material as they provide data that have been interpreted by “specialists” (linguists) working on a much larger amount of data than can be expected of any student (or teacher) and using more sophisticated tools and methods. In my teaching activity I have used the Cobuild Dictionary (Sinclair et al. 1990a) since it was the first produced corpus-based dictionary for learners of English and it revealed itself to be an extremely interesting point of reference for students working with concordance lines. I noted two main characteristics that made the information contained in it relevant for students’ work. First, the Cobuild dictionary provides organized explanations of multiple occurrences. In the case of “bid” (Section 6.2.2), for instance, students recognized the categories of meaning that were listed in the dictionary entry, but neither the entry alone nor the concordance samples alone helped them grasp the meaning of this word. Work on concordance data led them to “suspect” possible patterns accounting for the usage of “bid”, while the dictionary entry confirmed their suspects, at least partially, and also helped them distinguish between the specialized “business” meaning of “bid” and the more general one. Second, the examples the dictionary contains. Within ESP work, it often happened that the dictionary description was not “good enough”. The fact that the examples were authentic ones, provided comparative material to work on. In the case of “disorder” (Section 6.2.1), for instance, the entry descriptions did not make a clear distinction between the usage of “disorder” and “disease” or “illness”. The examples quoted, instead, were helpful to back the students’ hypothesis. Comparing the examples provided in the “disease” entry with those in the “disorder” one, it was clear that “disorder” was probably used in a more specialized psychiatric setting.

Chapter 7. Concluding remarks 

While there are many more corpus-based dictionaries now, for the moment they have been restricted to general English. Working with business language, I noted that many of these dictionaries provided comparative information which was not easily found in other reference material. In the case of “gyration/s” for instance, comparative information was found in neither traditional dictionaries nor the BNC. The latter provided 12 entries for the singular form and 22 for the plural, none of which showed the business meaning. The Cobuild as well as the (corpus-based) Cambridge International Dictionary of English, the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English all provided the meaning of “gyration” in the stock market setting. Although many business terms can probably be considered of a wide general interest and are included in general dictionaries, this is probably not true for the language of medicine or of more technical disciplines, such as engineering or chemistry. For medicine, I often wondered whether a corpus-based specialized dictionary might have provided “the missing clue” for learners’ searches. The description of “disorder”, for instance, was obviously far less “adequate” than the description of “bid” but both provided interesting material for the students’ work. However, while the limits in the dictionary description of “disorder” probably made the students’ search more interesting, a better explanation of “assay” was required (and found in an encyclopedia) to interpret the meaning of the medical acronym “RIBA”, where “A” means “assay”(see 6.2.1). It seems to me that work about the way in which learners interact with corpusbased dictionaries, alone or contrasting them with traditional dictionaries (see Li 2004) or concordance data, should be encouraged. And the time is ripe for starting work on corpus-based specialized dictionaries. .. Corpus work and teaching/learning skills It has probably been noticed that, in my discussion of concordance work and students’ skills, writing occupied pride of place. Writing seemed in fact the skill which most evidently “gains” from concordance analysis. While carrying on writing (or translation) activities, students have time to check reference materials and compare them. It seemed then worthwhile to introduce the concordancer as a reference tool in writing tasks. I noted, however, that using concordances helps the students grasp lexis, concepts and usages of language that may well be relevant in activities requiring other skills. Brodine (2001), for instance, suggests ways in which corpus work may facilitate reading comprehension. An interesting question, in ESP,

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

is how far corpus work may facilitate listening comprehension (e.g. of lectures and speeches as suggested by Flowerdew 1993a). Work with speeches about the European Monetary Union (see 6.5.2) suggested that highlighting recurrent patterns used in these texts may guide the learners to listen to and understand similar texts. Working with learners’ comprehension of news from the 2003 Iraq war, I noted that being familiar with lexical patterns involving the word “siege” might have been helpful for students’ listening. It is not clear to me, though, how exactly interaction between listening and corpus work activities can be carried out and how lexical patterns may become relevant and memorable for students. One obvious way would probably be that of using corpus work in editing speech transcription (in e.g. blank-filling exercises). But this is, I believe, an interesting open question. .. Serendipity Serendipitous learning has been noted (Higgins 1991; Partington 1998) and described (Bernardini 2000b, 2002a) in the literature as one of the most fascinating issues in exploring concordances with students. It has been observed that while analyzing concordance lines on the screen, students are attracted by a variety of potentially interesting issues related to form or content and that such issues often lead them to pursue new searches. While in search of a solution to a language problem, they may note occurrences of expressions they did not note before or they may read pieces of information provided in the analysed texts which seemed curious to them. Bernardini (2002a), in particular noted that incidental or serendipitous learning entailed in such a process should not be underestimated in corpus work and indeed its potential should be carefully considered. Encouraging students to work with corpora “travelling” during their searches may favour serendipitous learning. The risk, though, is that students can lose sight of the query they started with and while sometimes this may become irrelevant to them, there are occasions when it is felt as a frustration in respect to their expectations. While the problem of helping students to systematize their learning process has been posed by Bernardini (2000b) for large-general corpus use, with specialised corpora in ESP settings, it should probably be slightly redefined. One way in which small-specialised corpora filter and control the learning environment is precisely in their being “small” and “specialized”. Corpora of the type I have discussed in this book provide multiple samples of just one text-type and genre about a very restricted topic. This inevitably prevents stu-

Chapter 7. Concluding remarks 

dents getting “too far away” with their searches. As a student once observed about a project where she used a small-specialised corpus to translate a text about the European Union: “There were things I found by chance while carrying out my searches which did not have to do directly with them. But those things became useful later on in my text writing as the corpus is so specialized that almost all the texts included in it are relevant”. While preventing students from getting “too far away” obviously has its drawbacks, and restricts the range of “interesting features” they may encounter (so that comparison with larger, more general sets of data is relevant – see 6.2), small, specialised corpora may favour the appreciation of serendipitous learning by students, as “incidental” learning may be perceived more directly in relation with their objectives. With the exception of the studies by Bernardini which I mentioned above, though, for the moment observations of the learners’ process involving serendipitous or incidental learning are more in the form of teachers’ impressions or occasional students’ comments than systematic studies. It seems to me that some classroom research with more systematic collections of data (interviews with or comments from learners) may be helpful to observe processes connected to incidental learning more closely, both in relation to ESP and general corpora. .. Understanding “deviance” A feature I have mentioned at various points in this book is that corpus work favours observation of both recurrent conventional features of language and (consequently) of “deviant” patterns. I introduced this point in Section 3.3.3 above. There I noted that observing recurrent, typical language patterns may also help the analyst understand what is “deviant” and the effect it creates: for example joking or irony or emphasis of some type. Another way in which deviance can be noted in concordances is when expressions are used which are recognizably of/from a different register or text-type. Working with corpora, it can sometimes be noted that particular expressions are very strongly tied to particular registers. For instance, working with corpora and the language of the weather forecasts, learners of Italian as a foreign language once noticed that a concordance of “venti deboli” (gentle/light wind) in a million words of newspaper texts produces basically only instances from weather forecasts. There was one single case (in 15 instances) where “venti deboli” was found in a different text-type. This was a sports news article dealing with sailing. The local context in which “venti deboli” occurred was an implicit quotation of the weather forecasts for the day on which the sailing race was taking place. This concor-

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

dance, then, helped the students understand the “quotation” or the intertextual reference to weather forecasts. This example recalls the concept of “priming” introduced by Hoey (2004) by which he suggests that there are some expressions which are so closely tied to particular text-types or registers that when used in different texts they maintain some connection with that text. Comparing specialized and general corpora, students realize that an expression can be closely tied to a particular register by looking at its “deviant” behaviour across registers. An interesting example was found in medical corpora with the expression “flu-like”. This was a rare expression in the medical combined corpus, showing only one occurrence over 250,000 words. This single occurrence, though, attracted the students’ attention as it seemed appropriate for their own translation task. They, then, were prompted to search in more medical and non-medical corpora to check the appropriateness of such expression to the text they were constructing. First of all, they checked the pattern “flu*” in the medical component of the MCB corpus (200,000 words of medical book chapters). Here, they found 1 instance of “flu-like illness” suggesting that “flu-like” was probably not an idiosyncratic expression by an individual author, nor, probably, a translated expression. The fact that the expression was rare, though attested, in medical textbooks, raised the hypothesis that its use might belong to a different register, more “informal” or “colloquial”. To check this hypothesis, students looked for “flu*” in the BNC sampler and found one instance of “fluey-like symptoms”. This occurred in a conversation, “confirming” the colloquial use. Having found this instance in the BNC sampler we decided to have a look in the whole BNC corpus. There we found 17 occurrences. Of these, the only conversational example was the one previously found in the BNC sampler. The others all came from medical literature, mostly popularized medical literature (at least judging from the context and the texts’ titles). Interestingly enough, the conversation where “fluey-like” occurred was a conversation involving a nurse. Such an expression then seemed to be “primed” as a medical expression, though not a strictly technical one. Comparing specialized and medical corpora may help students define deviances and recurrences in respect to the registers they are associated with. This helps them understand more about the various textual shades that words and expressions might have. Here too it seems to me, is a potentially fruitful topic to be explored in work with ESP (and non ESP) learners.

Chapter 7. Concluding remarks

.. Recurrence, deviance and language awareness One of the greatest feelings that corpus work gave to me as a non-native speaker of English was to be able to say “as we say in Italian” before introducing a piece of word-for-word Italian-English translation which was absolutely odd in English but “perfect” to convey the idea I wanted to express. This may seem a fancy achievement but one which I found common among my students too and seems interesting in a language learning perspective. Observing recurrent language patterns gives the analyst an idea of what is recurrently and conventionally produced in that language or register and also what is “not” typical and conventional. Language learners (and non-native teachers, as well as permanent language learners) generally search corpora with an hypothesis in mind and they may either find material to support that hypothesis or not. If they should find supporting material, they may encounter instances of the expression they were looking for, of a similar suitable expression or they may understand that what they wanted to say was not so clear and that text corpora provide clearer ways to say it. When they do not find material to support their hypothesis, they have still often collected enough evidence to be able to say that that hypothesis is probably non-viable in the register or in the language represented in the corpus. This may suggest to the learners: a) that they need to create their own original way to express their idea, b) that what they want to say is “different” or “more complex” than usual and as such requires some type of negotiation. Introducing an odd, untypical, fabricated or complex item with any expression signalling the fact that the speaker/writer is aware of that possible “untypicality” may work as a remedy and be functional to achieving communication. Thus, awareness of what is typical may provide the learner with more autonomy to be untypical. This is an interesting achievement, in my opinion, particularly insofar as some initial debate on corpus use and language pedagogy highlighted a risk of quite the opposite nature, namely that proposing samples of native speakers’ language to learners may induce them to think that native speakers’ language is the only “model” to conform to. Indeed it seems to me that the question of language models is, again, an “old” pedagogic question, which needs to be taken into account in language teaching and learning involving corpora as well as any other material. Indeed corpus work may well induce an opposite reaction to models, that of rejecting them consciously. While, as shown in 6.5.1 and 6.5.2, students often adopt the textual and lexico-grammatical patterns suggested by corpus analysis and conform their translations and writings to these patterns, they do not absorb these writing

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

conventions uncritically. Rather, their attitude in carrying out their writing and translation activity is sometimes that of “playing a game”, filling in the various slots that may conventionally characterize a text of the type they want to produce. While they do not reveal this attitude much in the actual pieces of writing they produce (though some of this can probably be seen in the speech produced in 6.5.2 above), students sometimes make fun of the conventions they encounter and manipulate them in ways which recall parody, rather than full compliance. This seems to me potentially suggestive of a type of autonomy that can be favoured through corpus work, namely that language conventions can be manipulated, once you know them. But this, too, is a suggestion for further inquiry.

. A concluding wish The controversy about corpora and language teaching and learning has been very useful in many respects but is now running the risk of dividing researchers between overenthusiastic supporters and diffident or overcautious analysts, for ever. It seems to me that this “bi-pole” attitude prevents teachers from taking a real interest in the applied aspects of corpora in language teaching and learning. I hope I have made it clear in this book that I share neither of these positions. My own position is one of a researcher and a teacher who experimented the material in the classroom with her own students and attempted to outline what she found good or promising in it from the learners’ point of view. Over these years I have often heard researchers comparing the enthusiasm for language corpora to the enthusiasm that characterised research about language laboratories a couple of decades ago. They bitterly considered that the enthusiasm that accompanied teaching and language labs ended up in what was ultimately a soap ball and anything that a lab allows you to do can equally be done with simpler technical materials like tape recorders. My reply to these considerations is that, while they are partially true, they underestimate the heritage of language labs. What labs brought heavily into attention was the fact that language teaching was traditionally essentially based on the reading and writing mode and that oral modes had little space in it. Nowadays, there is hardly any language teaching environment which does not take oral language into consideration and this I think is probably a very important heritage we owe to research on and around language labs. For corpora and teaching, probably in the future we will have a similar deemphasising of the technological aspects. But research on and around corpora

Chapter 7. Concluding remarks 

has allowed us to uncover aspects which will be hardly dismissable in the future. One of these may be that of showing that language forms and structures are more a matter of conventional “idiomatic” regularity than rational rules and that as such they are, at least to a certain extent, interpretable and debatable. Another one is the fact that performing corpus work gives the learners the opportunity to participate in discussion about language forms and structures and contribute to the debate critically. The possibility of enhancing debate about structures and forms emerged strongly with concordance data and involves various aspects of teaching and learning as well as the view of language structure that most teachers and learners share. In the future, this may not be the only data provoking debate about forms and functions in the classroom and we may well see that students will debate on language contrasting information from different types of material. It was corpus work which brought this issue to attention and this may be its enriching heritage. And my concluding wish to the readers of this book.

Appendix 1

Concordance of “worth” in the MCB corpus (1,000,000 words), left sorted 1 2

rpret. There is one apposite text which may be worth a closer look.

If somethin

ly touch on here, but which seems to me to be worth a great deal more investigation and discu

3

hich each person is accepted as of equal moral worth and has equal opportunity to enjoy an eq

4

rstanding. In contrast, the autobiography, to be worth anything at all, is not only a rememberin

5 6 7 8

d about the biological problems which might be worth approaching, and biologists lacked the b efore spelling out exactly what this means, it is worth asking whether translating machinery is ughbred? I reckoned about two thousand quid’s worth at least.”

‘Well,” said Nutty. The col

the trade point of view, this area was probably worth between one and one and a half million e

9

reassurance. Nelson’s detailed account is well worth close scrutiny for it illustrates many asp

10

a ‘sticking point”, and for that reason it seems worth confronting his critique rather than buryin

11

ne-eighth of the entire biome. So its situation is worth dealing with in as much detail as is feasi

12

going on to ask what happens in area 17, it is worth digressing to point out that things are rat

13

e resolution of this problem is interesting and is worth discussing in detail. I can do this best in

14

e resolution of this problem is interesting and is worth discussing in detail. I can do this best in

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

doubtful for other reasons. As a result it is not worth discussing them fully here. One example . You sometimes hear people say that it is not worth eating differently, or getting to the right w knowledge and opinion. This last comparison is worth elaborating. imits of its rightful power.

Just as, for the Aristotel

This point is worth emphasizing not only because of its imp

of the lot, got good legs. The only one that has. Worth enough to get you started.” ‘And s er responsible for the prolonging of the war, it is worth enquiring why the ‘Hitler myth” did not c ism arising by chance. Although fallacious, it is worth giving in more detail. Consider a small pr egation seems to be regarded as a terrible fate, worth going to great efforts to avoid. May Like Gassendi, however, Locke thinks ‘opinion” worth having and searching after. Observation a at we have on the basis of sense-experience is worth having, and worthy of the name of knowle would amount to a quality of life which was not worth having. There is strong support for the id r life on the island. His words about kissing are worth hearing. The airmail letters which he exc t be joking.”

‘No. He would, if you make it worth his while.”

‘What are you getting at

28

s issue, by mortgaging it for as much as it was worth: innumerable latent entails were produce

29

a reporter from the local newspaper thought me worth interviewing about my impressions of the

30 31 32 33 34 35

n. My own, much attenuated view, for what it is worth, is as follows. Fundamentally the whole : if the trustee was insolvent, they would be worth little.

So far discussion has been li

insects, but there is really no need for this. It is worth looking in some detail at how the selfish ido of sufferers, but I conjecture that it would be worth looking into. Certainly at least one allege age reflects the law at Neratius’ time.

It is worth looking more closely at the expressions

o constitute the core of modern biology, so it is worth making an effort to master them.

Th

36

worse and will affect the quality of life. So it is worth making changes, but it is essential that i

37

hing new”, and there was ‘hardly any credibility worth mentioning” left for his last broadcast sp

38

as possible, has implicit in it two propositions worth noticing. First, medical treatment other t

39 rk of ‘genuine art” with ‘elite art”. It is, however, worth noting some symptomatic cracks in the 40 41

z’s is allegorical and Lu Hsun’s is satirical. It is worth noting that Naipaul, using the more spaci es for assaults on the police, and it is therefore worth noting that this offence is committed eve

42

rried as electrical impulses in nerve fibres. It is worth noting that the property of ‘gratuity”, disc

43

ich fall within each category. To start with, it is worth noting that the list is

44 45

not exhaus

uates Conservatism with the new right. Yet it is worth noting that one of the most influential wor recombination, refunctioning, pastiche. But it is worth noting that at least for the criticism of po

46

owner absolutely. The first is more difficult. It is worth noting too that it can arise in different typ

47

ht rather than by undertaking an obligation. It is worth noting, however, that consent to a politic

48 49 50 51 52

wever, there has been one case in English law worth noting. In ommitto

R. v. Tan

, one Gloria Gr

is not listed. Two other oddities are worth noting: first, the list does not confine itse

as been repeated, with over $600 million worth of assistance from the Bank. The Indone t. It is impossible. Even a normal 2000calories-worth of meals in a day would need to be suppl nough material had to be made to establish the worth of penicillin in man. Somehow, it was ma

53

ontribution” raises again the issue of the social worth of sport, recreation and dangerous exhibi

54

ueue up to deliver their twenty thousand words worth on the latest nuance of postmodernism,

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

55

dience will do more harm than good.

56

beyond what can be established without it. It is worth pointing out that it does so in accordanc

57 58 59 60

more conveniently, ’t the reportage that makes

It is worth pausing here momentarily to observe tha

. (13.7) It is worth pointing out that, if the initial Killing vecto Cabbagetown

worth re-reading but the strength and depth of t

one flight of stairs to visit the lavatory is not worth recording as exercise for the average per ous way.

Some incidents at local level are worth recording. The parish priest of Brackenst

61

n of a simpler doctrine, political welfarism. It is worth remembering that this division of chapter

62

cised very little during their life. Finally, it is worth remembering that exercise to increase st

63

principle is so infinitesimal, that the case is not worth reporting, and therefore, for

64 65 66 67 68

practical

describing the current guidelines in detail, it is worth reviewing the policy changes that have ta vention, but it is none the less unhistorical. It is worth seeing whether a historical development remainder of the examples cited. Of those it is worth singling out D. 32.95 and D. 33.2.34.1, in re teeth smiling in triumph. Sam knew she was worth six of him.

‘Very well, Deirdre. We’ll

acquisition of some hard-won knowledge is ‘not worth so much pains as the study of Philosoph

69

however, is a fairly disciplined pursuit, and it is worth stressing David Morley’s recent warning t

70

debates about the future of the inner cities. It is worth stressing that in

71 72

each

year since 1

y. The pattern is so simple that it hardly seems worth studying. If, however, part of the interseg million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not

73

ring as it was, was too far off coming true to be worth thinking about yet, if ever. Getting Hoom

74

payment of a (no doubt inflated) valuation of its worth to the legatee. Yet often it cannot have b

75 76 77 78 79

appraise her feelings of worthlessness may be worth trying (Beck

et al

. 1979). This invo

ifficult and challenging, but in many cases well worth trying. This should include an attitude of y. This seems to me to make parody and irony worth understanding more precisely.

But,

vealed by the concluding remark that ‘it is only worth while waging war if the enemy can be de cterial substance did not make further attempts worth while. Raistrick’s prime interest was in th

Appendix 2

Concordance of “dealing/dealings”(noun forms selected manually), in the MCA corpus (1,000,000 words), left sorted, extended context – first 20 instances (1) of the bid began to leak out. After the formal announcement by Australian Mutual Provident yesterday of its bid Pearl’s share price rose a further 87p to 639p. Officials at the exchange said yesterday that its current investigation was a matter of routine. If they discovered evidence of share dealing ahead of the takeover by individuals using confidential information they would institute more formal inquiries. As officials began their investigations the board of directors of Pearl, led by chairman Einion Holland, said AMP’s takeover bid ‘is unacceptable and totally inadequate because it fails to reflect the group’s financial strength and prospects”. Pearl advised its shareholders to take no ac (2) champion Gary Mason after he knocks out Tyrell Biggs in the seventh round of their Albert Hall bout. THURSDAY: As the Old Trafford soap opera unfolds, Martin Edwards, United’s chief executive, begins legal proceedings against Knighton for alleged breach of confidentiality in their dealings. Ajax join English clubs in European exile, as UEFA bans the club for the next two years they qualify for Europe, as punishment for the previous week’s crowd trouble, when the Austria Vienna goalkeeper was felled by a metal spike. FRIDAY: The good news of Robson’s call-up to the England squad is tempered by the withdrawal of Liverpool’s John Barnes with a hamstring injury. Kni (3) e main index, the CAC40, because more than half of the shares were not able to be traded. The Bourse allows the suspension of a stock when it shows a fall of more than 7 per cent in a day. Dealings are halted until brokers agree on a price, and then re-list it. The Bourse can also halt dealings altogether when the indices show a movement of 20 per cent or more, but this has never happened. The system prevents wild gyrations in share prices seen in London and New York, but are criticised by some French financiers as leading to illiquidity in share prices. WEST GERMANY: Trading in Frankfurt started late as a flood of sell orders threatened to overwhelm the market. The bour (4)

‘I’m amazed at how professional some of our clients obviously are,” observed Mr Jones. ‘They reacted very quickly to Wall Street after it opened.” By the end of the day he estimated that ShareLink was handling more buyers than sellers. Debenhams’ over-the-counter share dealing and advice service in London’s Oxford Street also recorded a blitz of enquiries from private sellers first thing in the morning, with business ‘extremely brisk”. ‘Our advice not to sell into the opening prices unless you absolutely had to paid off,” said Debenhams’ Graeme Morrison. Debenhams also saw some buyers, though not to the same extent as ShareLink, which tends to handle the mor

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

(5)

ed this way? Partly it is because of the growing conviction that the Prince’s taste is indeed reactionary, however much it may be used to support occasional liberal causes such as community architecture and ecology. The other issue which has been clarified is his behind-the-scenes dealings and his very visible assault on democratic public inquiries. He has attacked the results of one competition and planning inquiry after another, and coined an inflammatory metaphor with each assault. Phrases such as ‘monstrous carbuncle” or comparisons to an ‘old Thirties wireless” are meant to sting, meant to influence a planning decision and can often seem undemocratic. The surpris

(6)

to deregulate the British securities market, announced in 1983, which were to lead to Big Bang. There were then more pressing priorities. But since 1987 there has been added impetus to the development of the Taurus programme, triggered largely by the post-Big Bang boom in share dealing and the subsequent crash in 1987. Huge backlogs of work built up in the securities dealers’ back offices as deals could not be completed within the exchange’s usual accounts periods. According to Anthony Preece, director of operations at investment group Citicorp Scrimgeour Vickers, speaking at last week’s conference, there were at least 13 different design concepts for the future Taurus

(7)

swap challenge By CHRISTIAN WOLMAR A High Court case starting today pits local authorities and the City’s financial institutions against each other. Millions of pounds are at stake and one side is certain to receive a bloody nose. The legality of money market dealings by Hammersmith and Fulham Council in west London, which once amounted to exposure of œ5bn is being challenged by its auditor, Anthony Hazell, a partner in Deloitte Haskins and Sells, with the support of the Audit Commission, the local authority financial watchdog. The council embarked on a series of complex and sophisticated manoeuvres, including interest rate swaps, swap optio

(8)

nderwriters. A total of 169.2 million shares were offered at 105p each through Schroders, the sponsoring merchant bank. But the issue closed yesterday with only 13.7 million shares being taken up. This means the shares will almost certainly open at a discount to the offer price when dealings commence on 26 October. Some analysts suggested the shares would open at below 100p, but a dramatic fall is likely to be countered by bargain hunters. The flotation, valuing Hays at œ393m at the issue price, was shunned by investors partly because of the recent fall in share prices around the world. In a better market, some of the underwriters, who guarantee to take up any un

(9)

to privatisation have expired, the costs of remaining a holder of small numbers of shares are often uneconomic. Nor are the problems confined to share dealing. Transfers, running dividends together, and other services could be provided. There is the danger for British Gas that making dealing easier will prove self-defeating: investors can sell as well as buy. But the Stock Exchange and many of its members have failed consistently to address small shareholders’ difficulties. British Gas’s initiative should be welcomed and supported, and other big companies should pay it close attention. Business and City Page 29 891018 Column Eight: On a wing w

Appendix 2

(10)

are signs that institutional investors, who stood on the sidelines in 1987, are now so cash rich they are more prepared to pick up what they regard as cheap stock. Most institutions are not interested in beta and gamma stocks and once again the two market system operated with dealings exceedingly difficult in the second liners and prices often disproportionately down. BET, the services conglomerate, surprised most observers by hardly stirring. The shares were at one time 2p higher at 267p. They closed just 2p lower. But BAT Industries, bouyed by ‘unbundling” moves, slumped 60p to 758p. At one time the shares were down 88p. Other takeover candidates

(11)

hatever genuine part elements of naivety, good nature and simple piety played in the formation of his character, by his years of fame these had become aspects of a rather carefully projected persona to keep the world at bay. Behind the mask we may discern traits of craftiness in his business dealings, frustration in his professional isolation at Esterhaza and deep loneliness in his personal life. But behind these? The mind that could elaborate such novelties of structural precision and daring as the great quartets must have been, at some level, of staggering speculative capacity. And while he may have consciously considered it was his faith or desire to please that kept

(12)

to a tabloid, began publicly as recently as 18 August when it became known that he was buying the controlling interest in Manchester United from Martin Edwards. Knighton, Derbyshire-born and a professional for a year with Coventry City, was a teacher until 1984 when he took up property dealing. He was largely unknown to football when last June he was introduced to Edwards, the chairman and majority shareholder of United. In the ensuing month he persuaded Edwards to sell, accepting the stipulation that Edwards should retain his œ80,000-a-year job as chief executive for three years. The terms were staggering to anyone naive enough to think football was only a game.

(13)

e legislation for a ‘particular category of major shareholders. Mr Yuen maintains that the legislation’s dangers are clear. ‘We Chinese have a saying for this: ‘If you walk on a beach and there are some bugs biting your toes, you just cut off your toes to solve the problem”. There will not be insider dealing if you shut the stock market but does that solve the problems?” he asks. Mr Yuen’s critical stand has not only been moulded by the new draft insider trading legislation, which in principle he considers an essential part of upgrading the reputation of the Hong Kong market. His concern is a practical one, based on a perception _ which is shared by others _ that the market is lurching toward

(14)

pply of arms captured by Chad during the war with Libya to be sold to the Lebanese Christians, through intermediaries in Tunis and Iraq. He had a colourful past. In the 1970s, when he was known as ‘Jacky des Halles”, he was prominent in the world of organised crime. He turned to arms dealing in Africa and claimed, with some plausibility, to be an unofficial emissary of the French secret service. The presence of Pentrite in the wreckage, especially in the remains of the forward hold, does not necessarily mean it was destroyed by a bomb. It apparently blew apart when the Pentrite formed a fireball of 3,000C and 10 ft in diameter. But the investigators said yesterday that the explosive co



 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

(15)

ok fright at indications that the spiralling costs of the Channel tunnel would not be offset by increased traffic estimates. By the close, the shares had fallen a further 40p on the London market to close at 560p while they ended the day on the French bourse Fr3.6 lower at Fr59.9 amid heavy dealing in both markets. As the shares continued to fall in the wake of Eurotunnel’s estimate that the project would cost at least œ2.2bn more than forecast, Alastair Morton, co-chairman of the Anglo-French consortium was in Paris trying to persuade the French banks of the need for new financing. Despite the jitters the cost escalation has caused in the City, the French appear to be taking

(16)

try after the recently re-classified Abbey National. But since privatisation three years ago, the corporation has watched the ranks of its shareholders almost halve from 4.2 million. Faced with this decline and the fact that it shows no sign of stopping, the corporation is looking at how to make dealing in its shares more attractive. Obviously, there is an element of self-interest. As a private sector utility with 17 million customers, British Gas needs every channel of communication with consumers. Since a quarter of its shares are held by individuals a drift of stock to institutions could also reflect poorly on the principle of privatisation, and undermine attempts by British Gas’s new chairman, B

(17)

s and Sells has pulled out of its merger with Touche Ross and is expected to join up with Coopers ∧ Lybrand. This page and View from City Road, page 31 Mitsubishi listing: Mitsubishi has became the first Japanese general trading company to be listed on the London Stock Exchange. Dealings in its shares begin today. BAT distortion: Seven out of the 10 leading merchant banks in the Acquistions Monthly league table of corporate finance activity were involved in the Hoylake bid for BAT Industries. Page 31 Decline encouraging: The dollars 142m deline in Britain’s reserves of gold and foreign exchange to dollars 42.88bn was less than many had been fearing. Page 30 Dow recor

(18)

e a financial buyer, looking at the company as an investment rather than an addition to existing operations. James Neill has attracted the unwelcome attentions of several predators in the past, including Suter, the conglomerate run by David Abell, and BM Group, run by Roger Shute. Suter’s dealings in Neill and other companies are the subject of a Department of Trade and Industry inquiry. The company recently valued its brand names, which as well as Spear ∧ Jackson include Eclipse hacksaws, in readiness for a hostile takeover. It has not disclosed how much it thought these brands were worth. Despite worse than expected profits reported last month, Neill’s shares lost only 6p

(19)

rt. The statement said the arrests were made by the force’s organised crime task force, headed by Det Chief Supt Graham Melvin, after several months’ inquiries. The task force was set up after detectives discovered that some of the money had been used to finance drugs and property dealing in the United States and even invested in London’s Docklands, realising millions of pounds in profits. About œ20m of the original money is believed to have been accounted for, although about another œ6m is still missing. A number of people have already been sentenced to long prison terms

Appendix 2

in connection with the robbery. Gordon Parry, 44, is in detention in Spain awaiting extradition pr (20)

e to reconcile them to his ownership of the club. Insiders also say the presence of his wife at the meetings contributed to his decision to pull out. The bid attracted intense media attention, most of it critical of Mr Knighton, an Isle of Man tax exile who became a millionaire through property dealings in Yorkshire and Scotland. ‘He wanted to develop his business on a private basis, and if he came into the glare of publicity as owner of Manchester United he would not be able to do that,” one of the negotiators said.



Appendix 3

Task 2 1.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Look at the concordance below. Read it vertically (as if it was a column) scrolling through the search word. Which words occur more frequently on the right of “a market”? nging in outside equity, but have not found foreign partners, their ability to dominate extension of the ‘law of one price’ across l staff to have a stronger knowledge of how dramatic steps to move their nation toward encing the societal transformation towards es to such things as the understanding of seeking to become commercially viable in ions with new ones that are appropriate for inational was to expose the local staff to ed behaviour. The alternative is a form of n, 1996) and effects on consumers new to ence in complementary activities closer to was large). This situation can approximate has been described as: The subdividing of n which the true segmentation structure in ld offer a different, and welcomed view in he firm to efficiently/effectively provide es by the extent to which they can provide ers and customers, makes the adoption of e literature that test hypotheses relating ohli, 1993). The established logic is that 1990), any translated benefits of adopting ate variables, or steps, that fall between d Kohli, 1993). The model postulates that ncreased firm value. The model posits that tation literature. Early considerations of nt literature is that understanding of how es an explanation of the process, whereby The results support the hypothesis that mpacts also clarifies that the benefits of litics. In adapting to such an environment proposition in marketing strategy is that (or, indeed, the complementary effect of at makes explicit the processes, whereby important intermediate variables between s. These perceptual differences constitute tcomes? We propose that the presence of h flow. The model also acknowledges that tion of interest is, what is the impact of r empirical studies that seek to correlate ework for firms to compare the benefits of ay, 1994). As a result it is possible that erest to us as this is the method by which

a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a

market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market market

able to meet their needs. For se becomes even stronger. Often b comprising 300 million consume economy operates. One concern economy than the other four nati economy is that of developing a economy, the latest functional e economy. Economic reforms, in economy. The dismantling of lon economy; to instill world standar enforcement mechanism, achieve (Heilman et al., 2000). A study b in which those activities applied. in which there are two segments into distinct subsets of customer is unobserved, and hence the tru of complacent players. A market offering of value to a market seg offering of value to a market seg orientation particularly appropriat orientation to firm performance a orientation provides the basis for orientation should also be recog orientation and eventual perform orientation helps a firm to both c orientation guides investment in orientation in the services indust orientation influences performanc orientation is transformed into cu orientation can assist firms to ac orientation are not realised in the orientation is vital. As a conseq orientation is positively related to orientation on other asset forms) orientation and emphasis on cus orientation and increased firm val orientation gap that relates to a orientation gap affects the servic orientation may improve the perf orientation gap between busines orientation with traditional meas orientation with alternative intern orientation is even more central t orientation influences the way in

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

2.

e relationships between the dimensions of ing sectors. However, there is evidence of ist analysis of the costs and benefits of rial action, which is in turn motivated by h relationships are logically fostered by onsistent perceptions among consumers. tioned by some as important, although as the services brand and staff behaviour. As can provide a market offering of value to vely provide a market offering of value to research to develop an effective model of egory from which a purchase is made. For ecause financial services firms compete in ice. 3.1. Single-category analysis For re of these types of differences exists in hen consumer interaction effects exist in onstruct is embedded within our model as al changes that propelled Hungary toward disputing parties to buy or sell shares at ent mechanism, achieved by establishing keting approach requires that firms act in s, the competitor intelligence gathered by ased assets and other asset types. First, tput: it is the outcome of the creation of sets, justification for efforts to develop and sales costs enhance the cash flow of men’s advocate. This failure to implement to identifying the steps that fall between the ability to communicate the benefits of tandards and values more consistent with arket sensing by the firm, a capability of .. successful innovation is the product of s, therefore, seen as being the outcome of the 5th percentile of leverage) will have onship between producer and consumer is n attempting to determine how to segment pportunities by fostering the extension of

a a a a a A a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a

market orientation, the creation of value market orientation-performance link in th market orientation. The cost-per-custom market orientation. However, we perceiv market orientation. As an active particip market research consultant spoke abou market research consultant stated: ”but market research consultant stated: The market segment(s) in both efficient and market segment(s). Because many reso market that describes the four previousl market with S segments, the probability market with generally undifferentiated pr market with S segments, the probability market, but is not accounted for in the s market, firms cannot view the marketing market-based asset, competitive advant market-based economy took place very market-determined price; and (3) voting market-orientated sanction similar to the market-oriented fashion, i.e. understand market-oriented firm can be used to imp market-oriented firm may uncover throug market-oriented organisation. This make market-oriented organisation, and frame market-oriented firm. This may be recog market-oriented policy in midwifery can market-oriented business culture and pe market-oriented culture across functiona market-oriented economy.” In recent ye market-oriented company (Day, 1994). market-oriented culture coupled with ent market-shaping approach, which is highl market-to-book ratio almost 50 percent market. The market is the gap which se market. We believe this should be of us market’s products and/or services to exi

You have probably observed that “a market-oriented” is a recurrent combination of words in the concordance above. Focus on the concordance of “a market-oriented” and look at words on the right of it. Are there words that are repeated? Are there words sharing a similar meaning?

1

to identifying the steps that fall between a market-oriented business culture and performance ou

2

market sensing by the firm, a capability of a market-oriented company (Day, 1994). As a result it

3 4

he ability to communicate the benefits of a market-oriented culture across functional areas with . successful innovation is the product of a market-oriented culture coupled with entrepreneurial

5

w standards and values more consistent with a market-oriented economy.” In recent years, for exam

6

rketing approach requires that firms act in a market-oriented fashion, i.e. understand what custom

7

based assets and other asset types. First, a market-oriented firm may uncover through its intelli

8

s, the competitor intelligence gathered by a market-oriented firm can be used to improve the posi

9

ng and sales costs enhance the cash flow of a market-oriented firm. This may be recognised in high

10

sets, justification for efforts to develop a market-oriented organisation, and framework that can

11

tput: it is the outcome of the creation of a market-oriented organisation. This makes for a virtu

12

men’s advocate. This failure to implement a market-oriented policy in midwifery can be explained

Appendix 3 3.

In the concordance above, you have probably noticed that “a market-oriented” is attributed to a firm or to the “business culture” of that firm. Now look at “marketoriented” with a larger bit of context. Is a “market-oriented” attitude a positive or a negative one, for a firm? How many examples make this clear?

(1) ction and employee satisfaction. The strategic marketing literature views value more as an output: it is the outcome of the creation of a market-oriented organisation. This makes for a virtuous circle, but the circle is often incomplete, since employees’ views are often less well-known than customers’ views. Therefore (2) carried out, despite the midwives’ shared value of meeting women’s needs and of being the women’s advocate. This failure to implement a market-oriented policy in midwifery can be explained by the power in a shared myth, and its function in justifying a group to itself and its peers. Conclusions Implications of these findings for (3) g to satisfy their customers and thereby achieve ongoing profitability. In effect, a relationship marketing approach requires that firms act in a market-oriented fashion, i.e. understand what customers need and deliver the customer value expected (Dalgic, 2000; Grönroos, 1995). This is especially true for business services contexts, (4) g customer value. Equally the interaction that occurs with service personnel enables enhanced market sensing by the firm, a capability of a market-oriented company (Day, 1994). As a result it is possible that a market orientation is even more central to the performance of services firms. The papers in this special issue are I (5) Quicker and more extensive market penetration, shorter sales cycles, and decreased marketing and sales costs enhance the cash flow of a market-oriented firm. This may be recognised in higher valuations, which ultimately translate into higher share prices and wealth creation for the owners of the firm. Article type: Wholly theoretic (6) tion are becoming more apparent within the literature. For example, Slater (1997, p. 165) argues: ... successful innovation is the product of a market-oriented culture coupled with entrepreneurial values. In practical terms this means the willingness to take risks and learn from mistakes. For this scenario, innovation is central but (7) s to management practice by providing a logical rationale for investments in marketbased assets, justification for efforts to develop a market-oriented organisation, and framework that can be used to both guide and analyse the strategies of market-oriented firms. Market orientation and service firm performance (8) stomer value-based business strategy. Chang and Chen (1998) make an important contribution to identifying the steps that fall between a market-oriented business culture and performance outcomes. These authors developed a conceptual model that postulates both a direct effect for market orientation on business perfor (9) he way in which a firm interacts with its customers. There is also a relationship between market-based assets and other asset types. First, a market-oriented firm may uncover through its intelligence about customers or a competitor that investment is required in a non-market asset to achieve or maintain their competitive position.

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

(10) r perceived value is also influenced by comparisons made with offerings by competitors. Thus, the competitor intelligence gathered by a market-oriented firm can be used to improve the positioning of the offering (or the firm itself). Market orientation thus influences both the numerator and the denominator of this equation. To co (11) According to [Puffer ], generational shifts have created a desire for change and have created ”new standards and values more consistent with a market-oriented economy.” In recent years, for example, employee layoffs have gained greater acceptance. The winds of change are being so profoundly felt in Russia that a US ambassad (12) This model emphasises cash flow, which has three clear benefits. First, it provides the ability to communicate the benefits of a market-oriented culture across functional areas within a firm. The language of cash flow is universal. Second, it emphasises that market-based assets are an important investment type

Appendix 4

Task 3 The corpus we are going to analyze contains research papers from marketing academic journals. In the left column in the table below, you can read a description of the journal’s main purposes and interests. In the right column, you can see a list of words which are very frequently used in the papers collected in the corpus. Can the frequency of these words be justified on the basis of the topics listed in the journal’s description? JOURNAL DESCRIPTION: EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MARKETING Key Journal Audiences – Academics and corporate/education libraries – Senior and middle marketing management – Senior executives in distribution, market research and advertising Coverage – Comparative studies – Customer policy and service – Implications of import and export legislation – Marketing abstracts – Marketing experiences – Marketing in developing countries – Marketing of services – Marketing planning – Product development – Social, cultural and economic effects of of marketing

JOURNAL KEYWORD LIST 1. marketing 26. supporters 2. internationalisation 27. football 3. training 28. system 4. brands 29. midwives 5. sales 30. gap 6. brand 31. activities 7. crm 32. retailers 8. sponsorship 33. per 9. characteristics 34. quantitative 10. pioneer 35. what 11. market 36. leveraging 12. corporate 37. theory 13. orientation 38. club 14. customer 39. retail 15. branding 40. program 16. critical 41. campaign 17. services 42. figure 18. you 43. uk 19. behaviour 44. balmer 20. cent 45. satisfaction 21. organisation 46. consultant 22. customers 47. polls 23. planning 48. it 24. staff 49. identity 25. com 50. fans

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

JOURNAL DESCRIPTION INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN MARKETING The International Journal of Research in Marketing covers the entire area of marketing: profit as well as non-profit marketing, consumer behaviour, product decisions, pricing marketing communication, marketing channels, strategic marketing planning, industrial marketing, international marketing etc. Methodological subject areas to be covered are, for example, the philosophical basis of marketing theory and research, the confrontation of different research traditions, and theoretical reflections on the nature, scope, and boundaries of marketing. Special attention will be paid to topics such as comparative marketing, cross-cultural aspects of marketing, the relationship between government and marketing, and marketing and society.

JOURNAL KEYWORD LIST 1. disconfirmation 26. for 2. characteristics 27. group 3. interdependence 28. generalizability 4. choice 29. error 5. items 30. scores 6. preference 31. object 7. attribute 32. c 8. price 33. is 9. category 34. spe 10. segments 35. item 11. categories 36. across 12. scale 37. models 13. household 38. gen 14. distributor 39. discussion 15. consumers 40. brand 16. preferences 41. mean 17. dependence 42. panel 18. segment 43. e 19. pc 44. b 20. purchase 45. service 21. vacation 46. data 22. markstrat 47. measurement 23. model 48. characteristic 24. segmentation 49. approach 25. consumer 50. for

You can see that some words seem to be very much in line with the journal’s topics and issues; some more words, instead, do not seem so. Choose one of these words and generate a concordance. Does the concordance suggest why that word is a keyword in the corpus?

Appendix 5

Concordance of “bid”in the MCA corpus (business section: 200,000 words), left sorted 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

abandoned its dollars 1.5bn intex launched a dollars 1bn nched a revised dollars 2.9bn nched a revised dollars 2.9bn nths ago with a dollars 5.4bn ing an unsolicited dollars 7bn 891004 ntinuing speculation about a ltancy business as well as a ctive bidders, is convinced a ould normally be defending a used as the springboard for a -one is really immune from a Company yesterday put in a lectronic Data Systems in a n and other subsidiaries in a ebruary flew to New York in a . But anyone who launches a s earnings. We have made a stralians should have made a n bank Unity Trust to make a British contender to mount a ears it is planning to mount a oved. But the likelihood of a The transatlantic gossip of a 3.7 per cent stake ahead of a t to change hands ahead of a week some were talking of a lthough SAM has ruled out a t of Neill, might be planning a p 10p at 873p, is preparing a trong Equipment, resisting a ostile takeover offers, says a in talks which could lead to a the recent buyout fever with a in S∧N after its abortive a lot of the speculation about 891010 Agreed g speculation that an agreed g speculation that an agreed any, has launched an agreed closed at 269p on the agreed e failure of the United Airlines meet Australian Mutual amid

bid for MGM-United Artists, t bid for MGM-UA in March bu bid for LIN Broadcasting, the bid for LIN Broadcasting. McC bid. The bid was later topped bid for American Airlines, the Bid for Eagle Trust withdrawn bid helped the shares improve bid featuring Bob Jacobi, form bid for a society is on the wa bid, will be able to surrender bid. An offer within the n bid approach.” Business bid for a ‘substantial rise” _ t bid to improve computer servi bid to slash debt. The di bid to convince him that her bid for Ferranti will want to b bid of nearly œ700m for a co bid for a building society. bid via an employee share o bid but could face Ministry of bid. Jaguar was inspired bid would still appear depend bid battle for Jaguar between bid. The rest of the stoc bid have fuelled the progress. bid today from BSN, the Fre bid, it might participate in a r bid. Williams declined to co bid. Imperial Chemical In bid from Caparo, fell 1p to 18 bid within the next 18 month bid. Its share price closed on bid for Northwest Airlines last bid this year. Elders has unti bid approaches is overdone. ‘ bid likely after James Neill s bid will be launched today. P bid will be launched today. bid for ITL Information Technol bid. The shares were suspen bid deal was thought to have bid rumours By JOH

 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Paris: Corporate news and jurisdiction to the EC on any life insurer sector. ‘Any 02p”. This suggests that any ay early next year.” Any hares lost only 6p to 191p as 891004 BAT which had a role in the BAT om played no role in the BAT ntly lapsed its œ13.5bn BAT ed forward to 369p with BSN 891018 UAL buyout market had been buoyed by the retailing group dogged by d manager, launched a cash the dollars 110-a-share cash fter launching a œ78m cash ken dollars 6.8bn consortium nnection with its consortium as withdrawn the consortium sts and upset of a contested up 9p at 469p. A Continental y concerned the Sime Derby ter authorities in a desperate uggles to rescue 6.8bn dollar y Road, page 33 Fitton drops 891017 Trump drops Pembridge extends , suffered the fate of a fading ted with the possible Ferranti senses another big financial erical Union, the favourite for Jaguar in preparation for a full as stories of a West German ounty NatWest. The highest Mr Knighton announced his ent, which is subsidising his are which can block a hostile sment than an unruly hostile th launched an eleventh hour were involved in the Hoylake t to withdraw. Hoylake’s ith rumours of an impending the ‘Part A” document for its as been calculated that if its business, and for GEC in its ut was forced to increase its rs since Meggitt launched its eds a new challenge now its , with about 40 per cent of its ual Provident yesterday of its ts had expected it to raise its enging their right to review its ng away if Jaguar made itself hich is thinking about a joint

bid speculation dominated a s bid above the Ecu2bn thresho bid which has not been discu bid would be pitched well ab bid would probably be with th bid speculation limited the fall bid boosts merchant banks bid. The most notable inclusi bid, were also in the top 10. bid to concentrate on securin bid rumours continuing to circ bid still grounded Fro bid speculation _ by junk fina bid speculation and dull tradin bid valuing the company at bid for LIN by McCaw, which bid. World Markets New bid for United Airlines of the bid for United Airlines of the bid he was preparing for Eagl bid. We would be happy to d bid was rumoured. Sun L bid for Guthrie and TSB’s thr bid to get December’s privatis bid for UAL From LA bid: Andrew Fitton, the chief bid for US airline bid for DRG by a week bid stock, falling 5p to 174p. bid. The new joint venture, sa bid following the œ1.1bn offer bid attention, recovered to clo bid. In a joint statement bid were revived. Saatchi bid is likely to be the winner. bid, the Panel says, he did n bid attempt. Mr Ethringto bid for Jaguar and does not e bid. However, it will not provi bid to wrest MGM-UA from C bid for BAT Industries. Page bid has lapsed but it could re bid coming daily. Elders bid for Bell Resources, the fir bid succeeds Morgan’s comm bid for electronics group Ples bid dramatically when Rupert bid five and a half weeks ago bid for BAT Industries has eff bid, which values Pearl at œ bid Pearl’s share price rose a bid in wake of the merger agr bid for BAT Industries. It acte bid-proof by tying up a deal bid for Ferranti, did not have t

Appendix 5

100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154

th the management. LIN bid: US-based McCaw Com he right to return with a lower bid. Industry analysts ha BAe-Thomson may bid for Ferranti By JE Cities may block MBB bid HAMBURG ( n it advised on another mega-bid, by Hanson for Imperial G ited Scientific blasts Meggitt bid United Scien ific Holdings said the Meggitt bid had no industrial logic an 891003 Grand Met bid for Whyte ∧ Mackay looks as though Grand Met’s bid is going to be beaten by half performance. If Millwall’s bid to go public is hit by the portant holding, when Nestle bid for Rowntree. Appropriatel ong,” he added. If a new bid can be put together it is France is one of a number of bid options which the board uickly followed by a spate of bid rumours, the most sensati erchant banks in demand on bid expectations By B and Caradon stay quiet on bid rumours By JERR summer Leisure, which once bid for Boddies. Shorn of the ry and increase its stake _ or bid. Jaguar retreated 32p keover group, whose original bid fell on Friday prompting a would rather mount their own bid. This leaves only on n the verge of a œ300m-plus bid for Caradon, the building radon announced a possible bid on 31 August. While ntrol at Neill with 78m pound bid By CLARE DOBI radon agree on 338m pounds bid By TERENCE WI for licences. A previous bid of dollars 110m per share The dollars 2.9bn renewed bid by McCaw would leave 2 it could return with a renewed bid if it secures regulatory cl p for sale. The renewed bid for LIN further complicates 1013 Market Report: Bid speculation puts some fiz ontenders to mount a rescue bid for Ferranti, a vital subco View from City Road: Bid fates in hand of market ffer was accepted, the same bid would be extended to Bel ntention to mount a full-scale bid when the Government’s go ake, is involved in a separate bid. Business and City ithdrew a dollars 120-a-share bid for the nation’s largest air atch the dollars 300-a-share bid if it failed. But United’s st Pearl for the 605p per share bid that it has made. Pearl’s to 599p on talk the signalled bid or deal with Ford or Gene cessfully to finance a similar bid a year ago when the airli per cent. The move sparked bid speculation the market. The rush into speculative bid candidates was seen by cent of the company’s stock. Bid hopes buoyed the price s about to launch a takeover bid. By lunchtime the tongue ld be the target of a takeover bid has been intensified by S on speculation of a takeover bid for the French mineral wa me the subject of a takeover bid as a result of recent busi lso keen to mount a takeover bid but would encounter fierce signed to ward off a takeover bid. If Pearl decided to r s poised to mount a takeover bid for Pearl worth at least œ so have to fight off a takeover bid _ Fininvest, the Milan-ba olland, said AMP’s takeover bid ‘is unacceptable and totall as a prelude to a full takeover bid. Jaguar’s shares soar panies made a joint takeover bid worth œ820m for Calor, t possibility of a joint takeover bid for the beleaguered UK d umours that a mega takeover bid was imminent. In ofte

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 Exploring corpora for ESP learning

155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209

HE much rumoured takeover . A œ1.9bn US takeover sterday of a œ1.1bn takeover unwelcome œ1.1bn takeover rs AS THE œ1.1bn takeover , ahead of a œ1.1bn takeover ars 7.5bn ( œ4.8bn) takeover r-old company as a long-term They may prefer short term igh dividend cover rather than . There are suggestions that llars as scepticism about the e company . . . only after the on and Paris, announced the with a dollars 5.4bn posted yesterday claims the continental Europe. The g off their jackets to fight the earl. The Pearl is fighting the e Pearl, which is fighting the g regulatory clearance for the day’s first closing date for the as secured its finance for the raw encouragement from the s I’ve taken on board from the finance, taken on to fund the ‘At a critical point in the gard to the need to keep the then. It decided to launch the harge that he is mounting the ich led to the collapse of the rty developer pulled out of the torted by the inclusion of the e 44p to 552p as news of the decision to pull out. The st and has been planning the as about to pounce. The n whether he should refer the ice of Fair Trading to refer the ince Friday to restructure the r 22 million shares. The s, prompting speculation the e the events surrounding the after the break up. When the estments, through which the equity. Withdrawing the uthrie and TSB’s threatened an obligation on the buyer to iged to allow any company to tyre maker, will be forced to T chairman, thinks is ideal to ny announced its intention to s making Caird less likely to would trigger an obligation to stake, it would be obliged to

bid for Rothmans International bid, by McCaw for Mteromed bid for the group by Australia bid from Australian Mutual Pr bid by Australian Mutual Provi bid by Australian Mutual Provi bid for American Airlines yest bid target. Business and bid speculation to long term r bid stocks identified by their bid action is about to break o bid widened. Delta Airlin bid is successful will we hav bid, after securing the suppor bid. The bid was later topped by a ma bid has no industrial logic an bid is being resisted by Pearl bid so the British insurer’s sh bid and the Australian group, bid, is not entirely clear to th bid in the US which he sugg bid looming, the faith of DRG bid, the management and uni bid were Britannic, up 27p to bid. I’ve talked to 40 major sh bid,” said Mr McErlain. bid process Ward was instru bid confidential prior to the a bid sooner than planned after bid to enrich himself and his bid on Tuesday night. Source bid, despite having a funding bid for Gateway, the stores c bid began to leak out. After t bid attracted intense media at bid since then. It decided to l bid rumours, which also embr bid to the Monopolies and M bid because of the high borro bid and find new investors, wi bid price is equivalent to doll bid could yet be rescued. bid to acquire Distillers and t bid was launched last week, bid is being mounted says, ‘r bid yesterday, Mr Fitton said bid for Hogg Robinson. In bid. Elsewhere Amstrad bid for Jaguar. Busines bid for Kwik-Fit, the tyres an bid for the franchise. Mr bid for one of two or three lic bid for Leigh Interests, a rival bid for the rest of the shares. bid for the rest of the capital.

Appendix 5

210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249

anagers and staff planning to whether GM was prepared to eral Motors was preparing to olled group, was preparing to CRC, could be preparing to reign predators queuing up to Davis withdraws rival UAL n its participation in the UAL ing ahead, it is clear the UAL Failed Manchester United be hoping that the unsettling ociated with its unsuccessful ration of his œ697m break-up ding a 697m pound break-up s not mean the company will mid speculation that it would investigation into the œ1.1bn to 646p following the œ1.1bn ially during January’s œ1.6bn 12.4 per cent for its œ110m 12.4 per cent for its œ110m MEGGITT’S œ110m tries, threatened by a œ13bn igned to pre-empt the œ13bn igned to pre-empt the œ13bn igned to pre-empt the œ13bn s group, has put in a œ150m r his failure to see his œ20m s for pulling out of his œ20m new dollars 6.1bn ( œ3.9bn) s made an agreed œ337.6m esterday’s agreed œ337.6m ll leaked: The agreed œ338m rt on Coats Viyella’s œ395m ised dollars 6.8bn ( œ4.3bn) ITED, which won its œ478m nd Roland Franklin’s œ697m ents is extending its œ697m support against the œ697m support against the œ697m

bid for the core business, the bid at the inflated share price bid. The shares roared ahead bid. Richemont and Phili bid. WPP, the communi bid for a large British society bid From LARRY BL bid. Even if the takeover did bid, as at present structured, bid draws reprimand from Pan bid talk will die down so they bid would go a long way to el bid for stationery and packagi bid for DRG, talks to Frank K bid for Macallan-Glenlivet, in bid for Caradon, recovered to bid for Pearl Group by Austra bid from Australian Mutual Pr bid for Hammerson by Dutch bid. Taken together with bid for United Scientific Holdin bid for United Scientific Holdin bid from the Hoylake consorti bid from Sir James Goldsmith bid from Sir James Goldsmith bid from Sir James Goldsmith bid for the Whyte ∧ Mac bid for Manchester United foot bid for Manchester United. Pa bid. But on Wall Street, bid for Caradon, the Twyfords bid by MB Group for Caradon bid for Caradon by MB Group bid. View from City Road pag bid for United Airlines. M bid for Coalite in July, has pu bid for DRG, the stationery a bid for DRG, the packaging a bid from Pembridge Investme bid from Roland Franklin’s Pe

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

Index

A academic –, , , , –, , , , , ,  asset/assets  Aston, G. , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  authentic/authenticity , , , –, , , , ,  autonomy , , , , , , , , , ,  (language) awareness , , , , , , , , ,  B Bernardini, S. , , , , , , , , , ,  Biber, D. , , –, ,  British National Corpus (BNC) , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  BNC-baby  BNC sampler , , , ,  Brown corpus ,  business corpora , , , –, , ,  discourse , , , , , , , ,  students , ,  texts , , , ,  C Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) , , ,  Carter, R. , , , ,  Chomsky, N. (Chomskian) , , 

Cobuild corpus , , , , , ,  dictionary , , , , ,  research project , , , , ,  colligation , , ,  collocation , , , , , , ,  COLT corpus  comply – concordance (definition)  concordancer , , , , , , , , , , , ,  (language) conventions , , , , –, –, , , , , , , ,  Cook, G. , , ,  corpora large , , ,  small –, , , , , , , ,  specialized , –, –, , , , , , , ,  used here (list of)  corpus design ,  creative/creativity , , , , –

D data comparison  Data-Driven Learning (DDL) –,  deal/s  disorder/s 

E English for Academic Purposes (EAP) ,  English for business purposes (EBP) ,  English as a Foreign Language (EFL) , , ,  English for General Purposes (EGP) , , , ,  English Language Teaching (ELT)  (translation) equivalence ,  English for Specific Purposes (ESP) learning , , , , , ,  settings , , ,  syllabus , ,  teaching , , ,  F Flowerdew, J. , –, , , , ,  G genre , , , , –,  genuine –, , ,  Gledhill, C. , , ,  H history  Hoey, M. ,  I Icame  idiom principle , , , , 

 Index idiomatic , , , , –, , , , ,  perspective  usage ,  intertextual  J Johns, T. , –, –, , , , , , , , , , ,  K Kennedy, G. , –, , , ,  Key Word in Context (KWIC) ,  Keywords , , , , , ,  L Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) ,  learner , , , , , , , , , , , ,  learning activity , , –, , , ,  process , , , , ,  task , –, , –, ,  Lob corpus , , ,  Louw, B. , , ,  M market-oriented  mattina  mattino 

Microconcord Corpus A (MCA) , , , , , ,  Microconcord Corpus B (MCB) , , –, , ,  medical corpora –, , , , , , –, , ,  discourse , , – students , , ,  texts , , , , , , , , –, ,  translation , , ,  Micase corpus , , , , ,  N needs students’ , , , , , , ,  teachers’  learning , , , ,  O observer  open-choice principle ,  P participant  Partington, A. , –, , –,  plagiarism  (lexical) priming  R register , , –, , –

researcher , , , , , ,  respect  RIBA –, –, , , , ,  S semantic preference , ,  semantic prosody – serendipity/serendipitous ,  Sinclair, J. , , , , , , , –, –, , , , ,  skills , , ,  spy , , ,  stare  syllabus –, ,  T takeover bid , – text-type , , ,  Thompson, P. , ,  traveller , ,  U Unit of meaning ,  unusuality  W Widdowson, H. G. , , , , –,  Wordlist  Wordsmith Tools , , , 

In the series Studies in Corpus Linguistics (SCL) the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 22 SCOTT, Mike and Christopher TRIBBLE: Textual Patterns. Key words and corpus analysis in language education. Expected April 2006 21 GAVIOLI, Laura: Exploring Corpora for ESP Learning. 2005. xi, 176 pp. 20 MAHLBERG, Michaela: English General Nouns. A corpus theoretical approach. 2005. x, 206 pp. 19 TOGNINI-BONELLI, Elena and Gabriella DEL LUNGO CAMICIOTTI (eds.): Strategies in Academic Discourse. 2005. xii, 212 pp. 18 RÖMER, Ute: Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy. A corpus-driven approach to English progressive forms, functions, contexts and didactics. 2005. xiv + 328 pp. 17 ASTON, Guy, Silvia BERNARDINI and Dominic STEWART (eds.): Corpora and Language Learners. 2004. vi, 312 pp. 16 CONNOR, Ulla and Thomas A. UPTON (eds.): Discourse in the Professions. Perspectives from corpus linguistics. 2004. vi, 334 pp. 15 CRESTI, Emanuela and Massimo MONEGLIA (eds.): C-ORAL-ROM. Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages. 2005. xviii, 304 pp. (incl. DVD). 14 NESSELHAUF, Nadja: Collocations in a Learner Corpus. 2005. xii, 332 pp. 13 LINDQUIST, Hans and Christian MAIR (eds.): Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English. 2004. xiv, 265 pp. 12 SINCLAIR, John McH. (ed.): How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching. 2004. viii, 308 pp. 11 BARNBROOK, Geoff: Defining Language. A local grammar of definition sentences. 2002. xvi, 281 pp. 10 AIJMER, Karin: English Discourse Particles. Evidence from a corpus. 2002. xvi, 299 pp. 9 REPPEN, Randi, Susan M. FITZMAURICE and Douglas BIBER (eds.): Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation. 2002. xii, 275 pp. 8 STENSTRÖM, Anna-Brita, Gisle ANDERSEN and Ingrid Kristine HASUND: Trends in Teenage Talk. Corpus compilation, analysis and findings. 2002. xii, 229 pp. 7 ALTENBERG, Bengt and Sylviane GRANGER (eds.): Lexis in Contrast. Corpus-based approaches. 2002. x, 339 pp. 6 TOGNINI-BONELLI, Elena: Corpus Linguistics at Work. 2001. xii, 224 pp. 5 GHADESSY, Mohsen, Alex HENRY and Robert L. ROSEBERRY (eds.): Small Corpus Studies and ELT. Theory and practice. 2001. xxiv, 420 pp. 4 HUNSTON, Susan and Gill FRANCIS: Pattern Grammar. A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English. 2000. xiv, 288 pp. 3 BOTLEY, Simon Philip and Tony McENERY (eds.): Corpus-based and Computational Approaches to Discourse Anaphora. 2000. vi, 258 pp. 2 PARTINGTON, Alan: Patterns and Meanings. Using corpora for English language research and teaching. 1998. x, 158 pp. 1 PEARSON, Jennifer: Terms in Context. 1998. xii, 246 pp.