浙江大学肖忠华语料库session 13.pptVIP

Frequency It would be inappropriate for language teachers, syllabus designers, and materials writers to ignore ‘compelling frequency evidence already available’ (Leech 1997: 16) ‘Whatever the imperfections of the simple equation “most frequent” = “most important to learn”, it is difficult to deny that frequency information becoming available from corpora has an important empirical input to language learning materials.’ Frequency can at least help syllabus designers, materials writers and teachers alike to make better-informed and more carefully motivated decisions (cf. Gavioli and Aston 2001: 239) Authenticity Corpus data are authentic by definition Widdowson (1990, 2000) questions the use of authentic texts in language teaching Authenticity of language in the classroom is ‘an illusion’ (1990: 44) because even though corpus data may be authentic in one sense, its authenticity of purpose is destroyed by its use with an unintended audience of language learners Authenticity Widdowson’s (2003) distinction between genuineness (features of text as a product) vs. authenticity (features of discourse as a process) Corpora are genuine in that they comprise attested language use, but they are not authentic for language teaching because their contexts (as opposed to co-texts) have been deprived Implication? Only language produced for imaginary situations in the classroom is ‘authentic’ Authenticity Product (text) vs. process (discourse) Using product as evidence for process may not be less reliable; sometimes this is the only practical way of finding about process (cf. Stubbs 2001) Stubbs (2001) draws a parallel between corpora in corpus linguistics and rocks in geology ‘both assume a relation between process and product. By and large, the processes are invisible, and must be inferred from the products’ Authenticity Like geologists who study rocks (products) because they are interested in geological processes (e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes) to which they do not have direct acces