Paper for Corpora for English language teaching and learning - guidelines

Your topic

Some suggestions for essay titles are given below. You can also propose your own topic and/or
carry out an analysis of an aspect of the English language that you are interested in. This might be a
comparison of two similar linguistic features, for example two (apparent) synonyms; or the use of a
word or grammatical feature in two different corpora representing two different registers. Be
realistic and don’t set yourself too big a challenge. Discuss your topic with your teacher as your
ideas may need some tweaking.

When you choose your topic and define your research question, consider whether you can:

 Find relevant texts (for example, academic journal articles) and/or corpus material;
 Complete the essay in the time that you have set yourself (see deadlines in Moodle);

Possible titles
1. How can a specialised corpus be used for data-driven learning?
2. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of using large corpora (such as COCA)
for data-driven learning?
3. Corpora are not widely used in language classrooms. Discuss why this may be and how any
problems may be overcome.
4. Discuss the pros and cons or hard and soft approaches to data-driven learning.
5. In what teaching/learning contexts does the use of data-driven learning appear to have been
successful?
Alternative:
Carry out a corpus-based study of an aspect of the English language that you are interested in. You
may compare, for example, synonyms; or look at a linguistic feature in different registers. You may
also use a novel or a collection of an author’s works as your corpus.
Whatever option you choose, you should use a corpus to aid you with your academic writing,
applying what we observed during the lessons on using corpora for academic writing. You should
reflect on how you used the corpus to aid you with your writing (see below for further details).

Your sources
If your essay is argumentative or a literature review, start by making a list of articles and books on
the topic you are interested in. Your reading will give you background knowledge of the topic you
are writing about. Careful reading of secondary sources will also enable you to use terminology
correctly and consistently. If necessary, reference to a grammar book will be helpful for use of
correct terminology.

Make notes and collect excerpts (parts of the text you want to directly cite) as you read. Copy the
excerpts correctly and write the name of the source and the page number while you are making
notes. This will save you extra work later on.

Make sure you organise your paragraphs with topic sentences and keywords that will help you and
your reader immediately understand what the paragraph is about.

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For secondary sources look, for example, at:

 the reading list for this course

 reference lists in articles you have consulted
 general reference works such as grammars and dictionaries.

Organize your paper into sections, with headings. Below is an example, but the number of the
sections and the headings may vary depending upon the type of topic/paper. Refer also to your
academic writing module with Gillian Davies.

 Introduction. State your aim briefly and give the reasons why the subject of your paper is
worth writing about.
 Literature review. Give a brief, critical survey of earlier work dealing with your subject.
 Aim and scope. State your purpose in greater detail and tell the reader what aspect you
intend to investigate as well as what will be left out.
 Material. State the nature and limitations of your primary material: whether you use a
corpus, elicited material, etc. Describe your method of collecting data as well as the
advantages and/or limitations of your material. Consider whether your choice of data is
likely to affect the results in an important way.
 Method. (a) State along what lines your investigation will be conducted, and, if possible,
give the most important sources of inspiration. (b) Define your terms and principles of
classification. Explain your use of abbreviations and symbols (if these are numerous, give a
list of abbreviations/symbols at the beginning of your paper). State any technical
conventions you intend to follow. (c) If your investigation is long and complex, give a step-
by-step description of what you intend to do.
 Analysis and discussion. First you present the results of your study of the primary material,
and then you analyse them. You will probably want to present your results in the form of
tables or lists of examples, or both. Focus on one aspect at a time. Long and complicated
sections should have a short summary at the end.
 Conclusion. To what extent have you been able to answer the question raised at the
beginning of the paper? Give a general summary of your results and state the conclusions
you can draw on the basis of them. To what extent do your conclusions agree with what was
known before? If some of your results are inconclusive, e.g. because you have not had
enough material, say so. Also indicate what aspects or areas require further study.1

Throughout the paper, give references to relevant secondary sources.

 References. List your sources in alphabetical order according to the author's surname. The
most common referencing styles in linguistics are APA and Chicago, with an author-date
system. You can use either of these. You may also choose to copy the format of references
in one of the articles that you have read. The important thing is to choose a style and stick to
it. Uniformity is important.

 Appendix. Include any long lists of examples or questionnaires here. Any examples and
tables which you discuss in some detail should be in the body of the paper. The appendix
goes after the reference list and is not a compulsory component. .

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Guidelines for writing paper adapted from: Stig Johansson/Hilde Hasselgård (2021)
https://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/people/aca/hhasselg/writing/termpaper.htm
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If you are carrying out your own corpus-based investigation

If your essay is based on some kind of an analysis of a corpus, you will read articles/books to see
what has already been done, what you could do, and how to deal with your primary material.
Primary material is the linguistic data you write about, in this case the corpus you have chosen. For
your primary material, you may choose any of the corpora that we have explored during this
module or you may create your own small, specialised corpus for use with AntConc. The CLA’s
Mediateca has a copy of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), if you want to carry
out a study on learner English.

If you are collecting data from a corpus, consider about how you store the data that you have
retrieved. You can save your findings in an Excel file or a Word document. Make sure you copy
your data correctly, with enough context, and note the source correctly at once, to save time and
effort later on. This is because you may want to look up the example in the corpus again (for
example, if you need to look at the wider context) and because you should specify the source when
you give quotations from your material.

Make sure you make it clear how your investigation can be of value for language teaching.

The stages of your investigation

1 The research question

State what you intend to investigate and any initial hypothesis that you might have. Your research
question will also determine your title.

2 Data collection
To start your investigation you first need to collect relevant examples from a corpus. The examples
may be extracted in the form of concordance lines, sentences, or other units, depending on your
research question. Remember you should be able to say which corpus each sample has been
retrieved from (not an issue if you’re only investigating one corpus).

When collecting primary material, be careful not to miss out relevant examples and not to include
irrelevant ones. There may also be unclear examples. You can include these, but briefly discuss
problematic examples in your paper.

3 The analysis
Classify and analyse your material. In a quantitative study you should draw up tables, and then
describe and comment on the data. Do not just present the tables; you must also comment on them
and give examples from your data. Each table should have a number and a label explaining what
data it shows. Present both percentages and raw frequencies. Also provide normalised frequencies if
comparing the data from two different corpora. You may also want to provide graphs. These should
also be numbered and labelled.

4 Discussion of findings
Discuss your results. What do they show? What observations, explanations or hypotheses can you
make based on these findings? What are the implications of these findings? How can they be of use
of interest? Think, for example, about how the findings may be of use in an English language
teaching context (to make your study relevant to the objectives of this module). Make sure you
answer the research question that you posed at the beginning of the paper. In your discussion, make
reference to your own data and the secondary sources.

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Tips

 Don’t leave your paper until the day before the deadline.
 Write a brief outline of your paper, organized according to headings, with notes under each
heading. Show this to your teacher before you start writing.
 Before you submit your paper, check it for any grammar, vocabulary or spelling mistakes.
Use an academic corpus to check words you want to use, along with their phraseology.
 Make sure that you apply what you have learnt during your academic writing course with
Gillian Davies.

Reflection on use of corpora

You should write a reflection on how you used a corpus for your writing (essay or corpus-based
investigation). Using a corpus will help you to use genre appropriate phraseology and appropriate
terminology for the subject you are writing about. It will also help you to avoid translating word for
word from your L1 into English.

In your reflection state, first describe how corpora can be used for academic writing (refer back to
slides from lessons and suggested journal articles). Then state which corpus you used, which words
you looked up, what results you retrieved and whether or not this was useful in your writing. Write
about how useful (or not) using a corpus was in your writing. If it wasn’t useful, what do you think
could make the process more useful?