Corpus Curiosities is a semi-regular feature on our blog ans is written by Leo Gomez. Leo Gomez is a teacher and trainer based in Toronto. He’s been TEFLing for over 14 years in different countries. His interest lies in a lexical approach to language learning and Corpus linguistics.
leo.elt.trainer@gmail.com
In my first columns, I described what Corpora is (a collection of “real world” language samples), how it can be used in language teaching and learning – and I addressed a specific English tense and its usage, according to what corpora tell us.
In today’s column, I will begin a series of posts where I will address easily accessible and free online resources that I personally use in class and have encouraged my students to use.
A lot of these corpora tools deal with:
- Word frequency: What words are high in frequency? How often is the word “iota” used? Which word is more common “unequivocally” or “unconditionally”?
- Word clusters: which short expressions are most common? “I mean” or “you know what I mean”?
- Collocations: Which words typically go with the adjective “avid”?
- Concordances: How is a particular word/phrase used in context?
Today’s corpora tool is a simple one. I often recommend it to students and teachers, especially those who are not used to using corpora tools and are not as linguistically minded.
Google’s Ngram Viewer
https://books.google.com/ngrams
Ngram Viewer is a user-friendly online search engine that targets the frequencies of words using a yearly count between 1500 and 2008. It can be used to search for a single word or a phrase using Google’s text corpora in both American and British English. For fiction aficionados, there’s an option for English fiction and English.
Classroom Usage
Recently, I was teaching a Pre-Intermediate class and students were having issues with prepositions. Their task was to describe things they could do ‘on the island’, but some students kept saying ‘in the island’ and ‘at the island’. Class was interrupted when a group of students asked me what the correct preposition was. I saw this as an opportunity to introduce Google Ngram to my students.
Whenever they had doubts about a certain preposition to be used with a noun phrase, they would use Google Ngram. I, of course, always double checked with them to make sure the research was done correctly. I encouraged them to take responsibility of their own learning.
A similar problem occurred in a writing class. Students had doubts about whether to say ‘in the email’ or ‘on the email’. Although this may sound like a no-brainer to a native speaker – ESL learners struggle with prepositions. This is because they are not only transferring their L1 knowledge into English, but also because they were likely taught prepositions as individual words.
Here’s the result of their “research”:
There is a striking difference in usage between the two forms. ‘In the email’ is far more common than ‘on the email’ – but a careful look at how ‘on the email’ is used, suggests that it is not incorrect to say it. When you click on the results (or is it ‘in the results’? Ngram it!), it is possible to see that ‘on the email’ is commonly used with nouns such as ‘system’, ‘data’, ‘list’, etc.
It is fair to say that Google Ngram is a good introduction for students and teachers who want to become language detectives. It is clean, user-friendly, and results are shown with a fair degree of accuracy. However, it is important to note that one should not completely go with the results shown. Further investigation as to why such collocations or expressions are being used, and in what context, is encouraged.
References
- https://books.google.com/ngrams
- Carter R. & McCarthy, M. (1988). Vocabulary and Language Teaching. Longman:New York.