Hey there everybody (Banana’s in Pyjamas, 1993)

I suggest you buckle your seat belt if you have not already done so, not for any particular reason I just have no witty way of beginning this blog. However today I am taking you with me on a journey through Corpus Linguistics 

Not really at all an exciting topic, I know, I’m sorry, we all wish we looked like this little girl right now. You’d prefer not to be reading this blog?

Corpus Linguistics actually is very useful for language learning *shock*

Okie dokie let’s start with the basics: what is Corpus Linguistics? To answer this question I will refer to my old friend George Yule to give a to-the-point explanation: Corpus Linguistics is “the study of language in use by analyzing the occurrence and frequency of forms in a large collection of texts typically stored in a computer” (Yule, 2014). Basically what this means is you type a word or phrase into the database and a load of results come up showing you various possible uses and meanings for that word/phrase. A good example for how this could be useful to an L2 learner of English is searching effect vs affect (luckily google images has my back here).

I don’t know about you but I sometimes still get confused about when to use ‘effect’ vs when to use ‘affect’ and English is my native language. So with this in mind I reeeaaalllyyy sympathize with L2 English learners. As you can see using a concordance software (e.g. AntConc) can really benefit language learners in terms of contextualizing different words that sound/look identical or similar. In short: By looking at corpus instances of the searched word or phrase in the form of concordance lines, you can observe patterns of use that would go unnoticed otherwise.(Tesol.org, 2018).

I have to say at first I didn’t really see the point of this for general language learning, but once I actually looked into what’s involved in Corpus Linguistics I could not deny the benefits of corpora and using concordance software, even if only to clarify a few confusing words or phrases in the target language!

I can’t say that I will commit to using corpus linguistics anytime in the near future but I will probably look into it further down the line in my language learning journey as I try to reach a native level of proficiency in my target languages. I know the name makes it sound daunting and complicated but I would still recommend looking into it, I may not need it right now but it could be exactly what the doctor ordered for you or somebody else!

So, that wasn’t too bad was it? I tried to simplify the whole concept as much as I possibly could and to show you the main benefit of it to your language learning so you wouldn’t be so intimidated by the big bad C word if you come across it again in the future. I wish someone had done that for me!

Until next time,

Kayla xo

Tesol.org. (2018). Corpus What-. [online] Available at: https://www.tesol.org/read-and-publish/journals/other-serial-publications/compleat-links/compleat-links-volume-2-issue-3-(september-2005)/corpus-what- [Accessed 30 Nov. 2018].

Yule, G. (2010). The study of language. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.