As a student of the NAU Applicd Linguistics program, it seems almost mandatory that I know, understand, and love corpora. For the most part, I do love them, though I'm not sure I know or understand them well enough yet. What I find so intriguing is the massive amount of searchable data that can maybe work to answer my most pressing questions about frequency in language.
I appreciated the discussion and refutation of possible shortcomings of corpora at the outset of Flowerdew (2009), as it's always appropriate to consider the limitations of the technology used in the classroom. Promoting bottom-up processing, being somewhat decontextualized, fostering mainly inductive reasoning, and even the sheer number of choices that may bewilder students (and teachers) are interesting starting points for a discussion of language teaching and the use of CALL. I see these points as valid, but I don't think that they acknowledge fully the variety of approaches and viewpoints that are necessary to reach many groups of learners.
I haven't done much with corpora in my classroom yet, although I'd really like to try using corpora to develop students' stylistic choices in writing. Even as a graduate-level writer (we hope), I sometimes have inconsistencies in register that break up the flow of my writing. For L2 writers, the challenge of mastering a new register like academic writing is daunting, and any tool they have to ease the transition is a good investment.
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