Abstract
While still not in the mainstream of language learning and teaching, corpora over the last two decades have grown substantially in size and number, tools to manipulate them have become more sophisticated and user-friendly, and several corpus-based dictionaries and grammars have been published. The field of Language for Specific Purposes (hereafter, LSP) teaching, a rapidly growing market and an industry-relevant branch of language pedagogy for which there is a lack of “conventional” printed teaching materials, can benefit considerably from a corpus-based approach. In this chapter, we present how we use corpora to teach a business Russian course at the University of Leeds, UK. In the first part of the chapter, we describe how, on the IntelliText project (http:corpus.leeds.ac.uk/it), we have simplified our existing corpus interface in order to make it accessible to users with no training in or background knowledge of computational or corpus linguistics and implemented functions to meet the demands of a wide range of users in the humanities. Then we look at how some of these specific corpus-based tools and functions can be used to facilitate and enhance two core LSP-based skills: vocabulary acquisition and register recognition and differentiation. In addition, we present sample exercises that we use to support our corpus-based tools in order to maximise their effectiveness in LSP teaching as well as in learning and teaching more generally.
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Notes
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There is a reasonably high degree of syncretism in the Russian case system and работе is both the dative and preposition singular form. Users could not therefore simply enter работе as a word form, unless they did not need to restrict their search to a particular case.
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http://www.ceelbas.ac.uk/research/networkprojects/funded2007 (project CN07SF-1).
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Users generate ten concordances by clicking on the collocation and a list of all occurrences of the collocation by clicking on the number.
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In the case of Russian, words like президент “president” and предприятие “enterprise” are correctly highlighted as non-affixed forms, as зидент and дприятие are not lemmas. On the other hand, words like сон “sleep; dream” and сад “garden” are not highlighted as non-affixed forms, as он “he” and ад “hell” are lemmas.
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Wilson, J., Sharoff, S., Stephenson, P., Hartley, A. (2014). Innovative Methods for LSP-Teaching: How We Use Corpora to Teach Business Russian. In: Bárcena, E., Read, T., Arús, J. (eds) Languages for Specific Purposes in the Digital Era. Educational Linguistics, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02222-2_10
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