Richards and Rogers (2001)

“This requires that the teachers ‘abandon the idea of the teacher as the ‘knower’ and concentrate instead on the idea of the learner as the ‘discoverer’” (Willis, 1990, as cited in Richards and Rogers, 2001, p. 136)

I think the quote above is the most striking quote from this section that captures the spirit of teaching students how to use corpus-based language tools. The article covers the various theories on how learners process words whether in chunks or as units and how these ‘words’ become a part of their target language.  The teacher’s role in this process is not to simply give the students lists of words to memorize like blocks to build a wall, but the use of concordancers and other corpus-based linguistic tools can help the students discover for themselves how words are used in various contexts and also what other words frequently appear with them. I truly wish these tools would have existed in my early days of language study!! The teacher enables the student to be their own ’discourse analyst” (p. 137), which is a valuable skill for language progress. This is yet another example of the ‘teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for day, but teach him how to fish, he’ll eat forever’ saying.

Johns (1991)

The Johns (1991) article, although 20 years old now, still holds valuable information. It would be interesting to see an updated version of this article, but the idea is about corpus-based language tools, concordancers, and the connection between form and function for grammar and vocabulary teaching.  I think this connection between concordancers and grammar class is a useful one for my own teaching because in general, I think of writing class when I think of concordancers, but pairing them with grammar class is a wonderful pairing of need and tool.

Both of these articles are quite timely for me as I just attended a workshop lead by my colleague on how he uses concordancers in his classroom. I definitely will incorporate teaching how to use concordancers in my future classes.

Please forgive the late posting. I have been battling a wicked sore throat and horrible cold all week. Thanks to Nyquil, my concentration span has been reduced to that of a sleepy baby for most of the week! Hope you all are well!!