Comment: Practical applications in second language learning

Interchange ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 57-58
Author(s):  
H. H. Stern
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Second Language Learning ◽  
Practical Applications

Idiom variation in Italian and English

1999 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Cignoni ◽  
Stephen Coffey ◽  
Rosamund Moon
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Second Language Learning ◽  
Italian Study ◽  
Search Techniques ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Idiomatic Expressions ◽  
Specific Variation

This article reports on two parallel but independent studies of idiom variation in corpora — one of Italian and one of English. In the Italian study, 324 idiomatic expressions were looked for in a corpus of 16 million words, while the English study investigated more than 2,800 idioms in an 18-million word corpus. A description is given of the search techniques employed to locate instances of variation. We present our findings by first describing the variation types common to both languages and thereafter examining cases where variation seemed to be wholly or predominantly language specific. Many similarities were found to exist between the two languages, and language specific variation could often be related to more general language specific features. We also comment on the overall frequency of idiom variation, which was found to be very similar in the two studies. In our concluding remarks we suggest that contrastive idiom analysis of the sort carried out, could and should be undertaken between other language pairs, and that the resulting interlingual descriptions would be of use in practical applications such as second language learning and computational tasks.

Corpus Research Applications in Second Language Teaching: A Look into Corpus-informed Materials Development

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Norwati Roslim ◽  
Muhammad Hakimi Tew Abdullah ◽  
Anealka Aziz ◽  
Vahid Nimehchisalem ◽  
Azhani Almuddin
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Teaching Materials ◽  
Materials Development ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Reference Grammar ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Reference Corpus ◽  
Clear Guideline

Numerous corpus studies have suggested that teaching materials design could greatly benefit from the empirical information about language use provided by corpus linguistics. In spite of the awareness that corpus-based research can offer valuable insights for materials development, still relatively small number of studies report on the practical applications of corpus data for teaching materials development. There is no clear guideline or framework on how corpora and corpus studies could assist in developing teaching materials. Hence, this study focusses on one grammatical item which poses problems to Malaysian learners, that is, prepositions. The objectives are (i) to identify prepositions in the British National Corpus as a reference corpus and the descriptions offered by linguists and grammarians as a reference grammar, and (ii) to provide a framework to use reference corpus, reference grammar and corpus-based research, as a resource for developing materials in the teaching of prepositions. In order to meet the objectives, content analysis was used as the methodology throughout this study. The findings showed that reference corpus, reference grammar and corpus-based research could be used systematically as guidance to develop corpus-informed materials. It is hoped that this contribution of knowledge could have an impact on second language learning-teaching.

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