How do we know if what we say is “right”?

…Check the corpus, of course.

Another great guest piece from Carmela Chateau.

“Like many other people, I became a teacher of English because it was the easiest option. After all, I’d been speaking the language since the age of three (I started late, but I haven’t stopped since). I liked English so much that I’d studied it at university, even though I was living in France. If I’m honest, I enjoyed the feeling of superiority that being good at English gave me, but that was a double-edged sword. Being good at English came naturally, so it left me open to attack: “it’s easy for you, you’re English”. And then a career change led me to teach English for Specific Purposes. And suddenly, the language I was teaching didn’t come naturally any more. (How can “coalification” be a word?) So I bought the first of a long series of specialised dictionaries and glossaries.

But I still didn’t feel happy. How do you know what is “right” or what is most commonly used by the people who speak the language? And then I discovered corpus linguistics. A good corpus is a big, balanced, representative sample of a particular type of language. Googling for a word or expression is a way of using the web as a giant corpus, but there are much better ways if you can find a big enough corpus.

Language teachers are generally happy to find free resources. Luckily, some of the best corpus resources out there are free. The Compleat Lexical Tutor is a very good site, with its own tutorial, but it relies on Brown, a small corpus of American English from 1961.

Many more modern and much bigger corpora can be found on the Corpus Architect site. You can get a free 30-day trial account, which will probably get you hooked.

For those of you who want something totally free, try the corpus collection at http://corpus.byu.edu/.  This site has the biggest freely available corpus of modern American English (COCA), and all you have to do is sign up to get a login and password.

And for those of you who really don’t like playing with corpora, all the hard work has been done for you on the new Word Frequency website, based on the COCA corpus. You can even test your knowledge of words. For the adjective “flimsy”, the site lists the most frequently associated nouns, then other frequently associated words, then synonyms for both senses of the word. Its frequency rank is over 13000, so you know that you won’t be teaching it to beginners. But would you have guessed that “broad” is in the top 2000?

13372 flimsy j

noun evidence, door, plastic, paper, excuse, curtain, dress, building, metal, screen, sheet, wall

misc too, wear, rather, pretty, base, cover, separate, wooden, cardboard, easily, prove, beneath

● fragile, weak, delicate, insubstantial || poor, feeble, unconvincing, inadequate 914 | 0.92 F

1411 broad j

noun range, shoulder, spectrum, support, sense, daylight, category, smile, term, area, definition, array

misc across, cover, tall•, •flat, encompass, narrow, thick, •deep

● spacious, wide, large || comprehensive, wide-ranging, extensive || inexact, rough, general || visible, obvious, plain || distinctive, distinct, thick 27191 | 0.94 A

http://www.wordfrequency.info/ ”

The previous guest pieces from Carmela Chateau are:

Language teaching, teenagers, evaluation and certification

TOEIC- The test of English for International what???

and her reviews (so far!) are:

The Articulate Mammal

Semantic prosody: A critical evaluation

Longman Pronunciation Dictionary

SkillsWork

Anyone else want to set themselves on the road to fame and/ or fortune with a guest piece and/ or review?

Tags: guest writers

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