Corpora - english

WHAT LANGUAGE CORPORA ARE FOR

Sometimes students want to develop their vocabulary by looking for meanings of words, but it can be surprised or look too much for them when they discover thatjust a word has a lots of ways in order to be used according to the context.

We can call “corpora (plural of corpus)” to any colllections of recorded instances of spoken or written language,some authors says: a corpus is "any body of text". For example, the teacher can read the essays to form a general impression of the strengths and needs of the new class, but he/she may also want tofocus on specific areas of interest. Also, while reading the assignments, the teacher may realise that the learners frequently make collocation errors. So, in order to examine the problem more closely,the teacher can go through the assignments, locate and list the unacceptable collocations, and determine whether there are any recurring patterns, that is, whether learners need help with thecollocations of particular words, perhaps words normally associated with the topic of the assignment.

Types of Corpora
Corpora come in many shapes and sizes, because they are built to servedifferent purposes. There are two philosophies behind their design, leading to the distinction between reference and monitor corpora. Reference corpora have a fixed size; that is, they are not expandablewhereas monitor corpora are expandable; that is, texts are continuously being added. Another design-related distinction is whether a corpus contains whole texts, or merely samples of a specified length.The latter option allows a greater variety of texts to be included in a corpus of a given size.

Corpora is relevant to Language Teaching

On the other hand, corpus use contributes tolanguage teaching in a number of ways. The insights derived from native-speaker corpora contribute to a more accurate language description, which then feeds into the compilation of pedagogical grammars...