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Corpus
linguistics for ELT Research and Practice
Ivor
Timmis
Routledge Corpus Linguistic Guides London: Routledge, 2015 Paperback. xv+213p. ISBN 978-0415747127. £29.99
Reviewed
by Claire Tardieu Université Sorbonne
Nouvelle – Paris 3
Timmis’
s Corpus linguistics for ELT :
Research and Practice appears as a milestone in the academic literature that
addresses Corpus linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching. As a matter of
fact, the main concern of teachers in the know about this relatively new field
of linguistics is to establish connections with their teaching. Although they
are well aware that some applications of Corpus Linguistics could be
particularly efficient in the language class, they often feel they lack the
‘How to use’ guide. The
purpose of Timmis’s book consists precisely of presenting the state of the art on
Corpus Linguistics and of explaining how it works before making proposals for
the language class. “This book, he says, does not propose, then, to ‘revolutionize’
language teaching through Corpus Linguistics. It does, however, seek to show
how the long proclaimed potential of corpora can significantly contribute to
the evolution of language teaching” [8]. It should also be noted that three
kinds of activity are offered to the reader throughout the book: Corpus search,
Corpus question, and discussion, which makes the reading even more instructive.
The
213 pages are divided into 9 chapters including the introduction and the
conclusion. In the introduction, Timmis gives definitions and presents
different types of corpus. He also explains what we can do with them. The
second chapter focuses on the very building of one’s own corpus. Chapter 3
deals with corpora and lexis, chapter 4 with research and grammar, chapter 5
with spoken corpus research, each of these chapters comprising a specific
section about implications for pedagogy. Chapter 6 examines teaching-oriented
corpora and data-driven learning (DDL). Chapter 7 deals more specifically with
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) with a triple focus on Academic English,
Engineering English and Business English. Chapter 8 called Corpora in
Perspective tackles the issue of the limitations of corpora and English as a
Lingua Franca as well as classroom options for models of English. Chapter 9 concludes
by addressing a series of questions the book aims to help
us answer in a positive way. There are two appendices (the second one
consisting of a list of existing corpora) and a very useful index for easier
reading. The Introduction provides the
reader with striking mentions such as that of Sinclair (1991) “who likened the
value of corpora for linguistics to the value of the telescope for astronomy” [7].
Timmis quotes Brazil’s definition of a corpus: “a collection of used language”
(1995 : 24) and insists on the fact that “language in a corpus is
naturally occurring” [2]. He then specifies corpora such as the BNC and COCA
(large general corpora) or CANCODE (spoken corpus), MICASE, CANBEC, and the
Hong Kong Engineering Corpus (ESP corpora), Voice or ICLE (learner corpora). Corpora
can benefit FLT in three ways: First
of all they can inform ELT reference works and ELT materials, syllabuses,
tests, and course books. They can also be used directly to teach English in the
classroom and finally, when it comes to Learner corpora, to influence the very
teaching of the language. As
for building one’s own corpus (Chapter 2),
Timmis ponders over seminal questions we should have on our minds: What for and
how? What language use are we trying to represent? [15] What kind of genres and
contexts? And above all, who are the potential users of our corpus? He refers
to de Cock (2010) who distinguishes between two types of transcriptions: broad
and narrow depending on the more or less precise and complex use we intend to
make of them. Encoding can specify metadata such as speakers, date and source
of text. Special tagging can also be made for lexical or grammatical search for
instance with online tools such as CLAWS. Timmis then explains what the three
basic analytical operations are: frequency counts, concordance and collocation
[17]. Frequency
lists are easy to generate. Once you have generated the frequency list of an
item you may want to know more about the use of the item using the concordancing
tool which “displays all the instances of the word or phrase you are looking
for in the corpus with a limited amount of co-text either side of the target
word” [18]. Finally,
you may focus on specific collocations and check whether they are strong or
weak. More is said about this particular functionality in Chapter 3: Corpora and Lexis. What is at stake in this chapter is
the reappraisal of the status of lexis and above all of the relationship
between lexis and grammar [23]. A lot of teachers will appreciate this middle
way positioning and agree with Wilkins (1972 : 111) that “without grammar
little can be conveyed; without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed“ [23] or
with Lewis (1993 : iv) : “Language consists of grammaticalised lexis,
not lexicalised grammar” [23]. All
teachers will certainly be interested to know that according to Nation (2013)
80 to 90% of language in conversations or books are composed of the 2,000 most
frequent words [42]. O’Keeffe, McCarthy & Carter (2007 : 48-49)
consider that a receptive vocabulary of 5-6,000 words corresponds to upper
intermediate level [42]. These
significant findings in terms of pedagogical implications have been made
possible by the use of frequency analyses. In the same line, Martinez &
Schmitt (2012) have drawn a list of 505 frequent phrasal expressions, which
happens to be part of the list of the 2,000 most frequent words [51]. Timmis
works out the fact that corpus-informed teachers would certainly understand the
relevance of an integrated view of vocabulary and accept to move towards a
syllabus made of words, collocations and lexical chunks [53]. The expression “corpus-informed”
rather than “corpus-driven” approach chosen by Timmis reveals his sincere
pedagogical concern as well as his thorough knowledge of the profession and of
the field. It should also be said that the language used by Timmis as well as the
explanations he gives are always clear and easy to follow, which is certainly
one of the assets of the whole book. In
the continuity of Chapter 3, Chapter 4
directly addresses language curricula and course materials. All teachers who
are old enough to know what the audiovisual method was about would perfectly
understand Biber & Reppen (2002)’s remark about the overuse of the progressive
form in the English class regarding corpus-attested frequency [60]. Conversely,
the get passive seems to have received too little attention in ELT materials.
One may conclude that Timmis recommends that course books follow the frequency
rates observed in natural language corpora, yet, this is not the case. In fact
a clear distinction is made: “The corpus-informed approach […] should not
dictate what we do. Alongside the frequency of a structure, we need to take
into account its difficulty and usefulness for a specific group of learners” [61].
In other words, a corpus-informed approach could have an awareness-raising
effect on teachers and help them lay a critical eye on the materials they are
provided with. Timmis mentions the ‘used to’ form to refer to the past. Why is
this form often emphasised in coursebooks? Timmis suggests that some items lend
themselves to PPC (present – practice – produce) better than others. To put it
differently, they are pedagogically rewarding, easily “packaged” in the
classroom like “Grammar McNuggets” as Thornbury (2000) calls them. Much as some
lexical items can be neglected, some grammatical structures may be unduly
discarded such as the new quotative verbs (be, like, go, be all) (Barbieri
& Eckardt, 2007). In actual fact, if one is to reduce the discrepancy
between the language used in everyday life and the language taught in the
classroom, one had better consult natural language corpora. An
interesting point is made about connecting Grammar and Lexis [71] when we learn
from corpus analysis that verbs like “bet, doubt, know, matter, mean, mind,
reckon, suppose, thank” occur over 80% of the time in the present tense while
others such as “exclaim, eye, glance, grin, nod, pause, remark, reply, shrug,
sigh, smile, whisper” occur mostly in the past tense [71]. Once more, Timmis
refrains from adopting a dogmatic position that emphasises conformity by saying:
“It seems reasonable to suggest that these corpus-based descriptions should at
least inform the grammatical descriptions we give in the classroom, though we
acknowledge that there is sometimes a need to simplify and perhaps
over-generalise to arrive at ‘workable’ pedagogic rules” [77]. This statement
echoes back to the 1990s when the French Educational Authorities implemented
enunciative grammar at all levels (with the recommendation to adapt the
metalanguage to each level) and advocated that nothing should be taught about
the foreign language that would become untrue in the long run. To
conclude on this issue, Timmis predicts three possible evolutions for the
teaching of grammar in the 21st century: there will be a shift from “monolithic
description of English grammar” to “register specific descriptions”; the
teaching of grammar will be “more integrated with the teaching of vocabulary”; emphasis
will shift from “structural accuracy to the appropriate conditions of use for
alternative grammatical constructions” [77]. Chapter 5 [81] examines a relatively
recent phenomenon: spoken corpus research. Spoken corpora are of three types.
They may be spoken components of large general corpora such as the BNC or the
COCA, or specific: the Limerick Corpus of Irish English, The Santa Barbara
Spoken American English, or the Longman Corpus of Spoken American. A third
category concerns genre-specific spoken corpora with, for instance, the
Switchboard Corpus (recorded telephone conversations from the early 1990s), the
Corpus of American Soap Opera. Pragmatic categories have been identified in
relation with the most frequent chunks in CANCODE: discourse marking, face and
politeness, hedging, and vagueness and approximation. We can easily imagine how
our students could profit from integrating such findings when they have to take
the floor. They could also be profitably shown the importance of ellipses as
well as tails in spoken interactions [94-95]. Timmis
does not hesitate to ask the right questions: Is the item “useful, frequent,
complex? Socioculturally appropriate? What will the spoken language feature
enable us to do communicatively?” [104] or to answer them by suggesting we
should prioritise very common, socially unmarked spoken lexis [106]. Having
discussed Corpus linguistics and its implications for the classroom in the
first five chapters, Timmis continues with a different type of corpus: learner
corpora. Chapter 6 : Corpora and the classroom How to design a learner corpus and for what purpose? Timmis provides the reader
with operating instructions regarding designing appropriate criteria: the learning
environment, age, proficiency level of the learners, mother tongue, stage of learning,
nature of the task, topic genre, setting, use of reference resources, etc. [120]. One main distinction is made
by de Cock (2010) between Mono-L1 and Multi L1 learner corpora. He refers to
the Japanese EFL Learner corpus as to a Mono-L1 corpus and to the English
Profile (CUP) or the Louvain ICLE or LINDSEI as to Multi L1s. The Multi L1
corpora enable users to identify typical errors made in English according to
the L1 and to compare the English of speakers of different L1s. This suggestion
is in keeping with what Granger already suggested in 1994 that a lot of the
lexical problems encountered by learners were L1 specific [126]. Timmis
also refers to teaching-oriented corpora, that is “corpora exploited for
pedagogical purposes or designed for pedagogical purposes” [128]. For that
matter, he refers to ELISA corpus (interviews of native speakers of different
varieties of English), the SACODEYL corpus (a collection of teen talk in seven
European languages, including English), and the BACKBONE (video-recorded
interviews). These teaching-oriented corpora can indeed provide authentic
material adapted to the classroom (especially teen talk). Yet, what teaching
method is the most appropriate? A
whole range of pedagogical implications of corpus linguistics is summed up in
what is known as Data-driven Learning (DDL). DDL involves a student-oriented
approach in which the student becomes himself a researcher and is invited to
make discoveries. According to Timmis, “the twin foundations of the rationale for
DDL are authenticity and autonomy” [135]. DDL involves inductive reasoning and
becomes helpful for lexical learning and can also be used to improve writing.
Boulton (2009) advocates the fact that DDL is within reach of lower level
learners provided that it is used judiciously [139] and according to Timmis,
DDL should be part of the repertoire of teachers and material writers. At this
point, Natalie Kubler’s work with her undergraduate and postgraduate ESP
students in particular could have been mentioned. Both her seminal research and
her pedagogical experience would have provided further concrete examples. Chapter 7 : Corpora and ESP [146]
may be particularly interesting for higher education teachers. Indeed this
chapter focuses on three types of English: English for Academic Purposes, (EAP)
Engineering English and Business English. Regarding EAP, Nesi (2014) identifies
4 types : ·
Corpora
of ‘expert’ writing ·
Learner
corpora ·
Corpora
of university student writing ·
Spoken
academic corpora Timmis
lists the British Academic Written English Corpus, the Michigan Corpus of Upper
Level Student Papers (MICUSP), the British Academic Spoken English (BASE), the
MICASE (the BNC Spoken Academic component) , or the English as a Lingua Franca
in Academic Settings (ELFA) which comes from Finland. In that case, DDL can
help the students to improve their writing skills and gain overall writing
confidence. They will be invited to focus on word frequency, lexical
collocations and academic formulas. Regarding academic formulas, Simpson-Vlach &
Ellis (2010) distinguish between referential expressions, stance formulas and
discourse-organizing expressions [156]. In Chapter 8 : Corpora in perspective, Timmis mentions some classroom
ideas and quotes Adel (2010)’s questions: “What do Academic writers say when a) they give an example, b) refer to other texts or researchers, c) introduce the topic, d) start their conclusion section?” [177].
Timmis is aware that DDL should be used in an adequate way according to the
capacity of the learners, otherwise, learners may get lost in concordance lines…
Yet, he has no doubt that giving students the opportunity to grasp at corpora
will make them more aware of language uses and more motivated in their
learning. In Chapter 9 [198], Timmis invites us to explore this
issue in particular: What methodologies might be suited to help students come
to terms with the inherent context-dependence of language use? Such a question
is not a new one (see the communicative approach) but corpus linguistics and
DDL seem to offer one workable solution. To
conclude, let us say that this book covers a great range of issues in relation
with Corpus Linguistics and its pedagogic implications. It is very well
documented and illustrated. The reader will no doubt find a lot of information
about the topic. He will also be constantly invited to do “exercises”, to ask
and answer relevant questions, and to design class activities. It is a sort of “hands-on”
reading combining research content and pedagogical issues. Of course, Timmis
does not do the entire job for us. And it would be advisable to conduct
experiments in the classroom at different levels of the curricula to get some
more data on Corpus Linguistics and pedagogical issues. This
book offers a solid background for that.
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