View Content #27322

From http://blog.tesol.org

Greg Kessler writes, "One of the great advantages of a corpus is that it presents language in context. This is known as a concordance and allows learners to recognize relationships among words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In particular, this extended context allows us to see collocations, or the connections, between words in the various ways they may be used. For example, we can get a better idea which adjectives are commonly associated with a particular noun and what prepositions are associated with a particular verb. If you think of how you may use a dictionary to learn new words, you realize that there is typically a single sentence that serves as the example for any particular word. With a corpus, you may have dozens or even hundreds of examples. Further, these are likely to be authentic language rather than the one contrived sentence that is likely to be included in a dictionary. Having access to multiple authentic examples provides learners with lexical as well as grammatical models. Corpora may be most useful in order to encourage learners to experiment with different sentence constructions."

Read Kessler's full blog post, which introduces the use of corpora, especially the Corpus of Contemporary American English, for language learning: http://blog.tesol.org/basics-of-using-corpora/