Corpus Linguistics:

Language Teaching and

Learning
Prepared by:
Nur Anis Firdaus Hamaru 0723506
Azeela Aliasa 0721502
Nurul Aimi Abd Rahman 0724044
 Presentation Outline
1) Definition

2) Scope

3) Corpus Used in Language Teaching & Learning

4) Application to Language Teaching & Learning

5) Summary of Article 1

6) Summary of Article 2

7) Benefits
 Definition
• Language learning : the cognitive
process of acquiring skill or knowledge

• Language teaching : teaching people to

speak and understand a foreign
language
 SCOPE
In language teaching, corpus has been used by:

• Focusing on a restricted set of vocabulary.

• Using “concordancing” techniques.
• Comparing languages used.
• Analyzing the language in books, readers, and course books.
• Generate exercises and student activities.
• Analyzing the usage, e.g. ‘obtain’ and ‘get’.
• Examining word order.
• Comparing similar word, e.g. ‘ask‘ and ‘request’.
Corpus Used in Language Teaching
and Learning
Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
(MICASE)

•It is a collection of nearly 1.8 million words of

transcribed speech (almost 200 hours of recordings)
from the University of Michigan(U-M).

• MICASE is created by researchers and students at

the U-M English Language Institute.

•It contains data from a wide range of speech events

and locations across the university.
 Application to Language
Learning & Teaching
• This can be applied by conducted a language analysis.

• The students use a concordancing program (MICASE).

• They will choose corpus to make their own discoveries

about language use. 

• The teacher can guide a predetermined investigation which

will lead to predictable results or vice versa.

• This exemplifies data driven learning, which encourages

learner autonomy by training students to draw their own
conclusions about language use.
 ARTICLE 1
‘I Think’ : Opinion, Uncertainty Or Politeness in Academic Spoken English?
By Inmaculada Fortanet

Purpose :
• To find out why academic speakers use ‘I think’ so often
and how they do it.

Methods :
• Subcorpus of MICASE including 5 lectures and 5
discourse sections is selected.
• The word ‘I think’ is counted by using MICASE search
tools.
 ARTICLE 1
‘I Think’ : Opinion, Uncertainty Or
Politeness in Academic Spoken English?
By Inmaculada Fortanet

Results :
• The expression occurs more frequently in
discussion than lecture.

• The use of ‘I think’ is characteristic of

interactional academic English although it
can also be found sometimes in monologue.
 ARTICLE 2
‘What uh the Folks Who Did this Survey Found’:
Expert Attribution in Spoken Academic Lectures
By Annelie Adel
Purpose :
• To compare citation practices in spoken versus written
academic production.

Method :
• Transcripts of 30 large lectures from (MICASE;
Simpson et al. 1999) were analysed, totalling 250,000
words.

• The occurrences of other-reference were automatically

 ARTICLE 2

‘What uh the Folks Who Did this Survey Found’:

Expert Attribution in Spoken Academic Lectures
By Annelie Adel

Result:
• Expert attribution is quite pervasive and
that there is disciplinary variation in
academic speech.
 Benefits
• A corpus-based analysis can investigate almost
any language patterns .

• With the proper analytical tools, an investigator

can know the patterns of language used, the extent
to which they are used, and the contextual factors
that influence variability.

• For example, one could examine the past perfect

to see how often it is used in speaking versus
writing or newspapers versus fiction. 
Thank you