USING CORPORA IN LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING语料库在语言教学中的应用.pdfVIP

USING CORPORA IN LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING by James Thomas Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic thomas@fi.muni.cz Introduction i In June 2005, I attended Lexicom 2005 which was held at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University (FI MU) in the Czech Republic. The workshop was run by Adam Kilgarriff, Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell, who together form the Lexicography ii MasterClass . Dictionaries for language learners was a recurring topic, in particular the criteria for deciding which lexical items to include, and how to present this distilled information to learners. Some of the corpus-based methodology employed by modern day lexicographers is similar to the approaches taken by language teachers and students using corpora for their own study of language. It is with a statement from Michael Rundells opening session that I would like to begin this article proper. In considering types of knowledge, he quoted the American Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld: Reports that say that something hasnt happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we dont know we dont know. DoD Press Briefing .iii Michael Rundell pertinently adds that there are also unknown knowns. These are the things we do not know we know, i.e., things we know only subconsciously. For example, in the case of language, it can be quite difficult to account for how one chooses a particular word instead of one of its synonyms, or wha