John Benjamins Publishing Company
Frequency, corpora and language learning
Abstract
I begin this chapter with a brief survey of how frequency – in particular, frequency of words – had a role in language learning in the days before electronic corpora existed. Then I consider how the ‘corpus revolution’ made frequency information available in a totally unprecedented way from the 1960s onward. But how far is this useful to the language learner and teacher? Is the right kind of frequency knowledge being captured? In the second half of this chapter, I will consider the equation ‘more frequent = more important to learn’, what questions of frequency we really need to ask, and how far they can be answered in the present state of corpus linguistics.
Abstract
I begin this chapter with a brief survey of how frequency – in particular, frequency of words – had a role in language learning in the days before electronic corpora existed. Then I consider how the ‘corpus revolution’ made frequency information available in a totally unprecedented way from the 1960s onward. But how far is this useful to the language learner and teacher? Is the right kind of frequency knowledge being captured? In the second half of this chapter, I will consider the equation ‘more frequent = more important to learn’, what questions of frequency we really need to ask, and how far they can be answered in the present state of corpus linguistics.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements ix
- List of contributors xi
- Preface xiii
- Putting corpora to good uses 1
- Frequency, corpora and language learning 7
- Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 33
- The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 63
- Revisiting apprentice texts 85
- Automatic error tagging of spelling mistakes in learner corpora 109
- Data mining with learner corpora 127
- Learners and users – Who do we want corpus data from? 155
- Learner knowledge of phrasal verbs 173
- Corpora and the new Englishes 209
- Towards a new generation of corpus-derived lexical resources for language learning 237
- Automating the creation of dictionaries 257
- addendumSelect list of publications by Sylviane Granger 283
- Subject index 289
- Name index 293
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements ix
- List of contributors xi
- Preface xiii
- Putting corpora to good uses 1
- Frequency, corpora and language learning 7
- Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis 33
- The use of small corpora for tracing the development of academic literacies 63
- Revisiting apprentice texts 85
- Automatic error tagging of spelling mistakes in learner corpora 109
- Data mining with learner corpora 127
- Learners and users – Who do we want corpus data from? 155
- Learner knowledge of phrasal verbs 173
- Corpora and the new Englishes 209
- Towards a new generation of corpus-derived lexical resources for language learning 237
- Automating the creation of dictionaries 257
- addendumSelect list of publications by Sylviane Granger 283
- Subject index 289
- Name index 293
