Corpora and Language Teaching (Römer, 2008).

The primary beneficiaries of direct corpora applications are...

• ... lexicographers and dictionary makers.

• ... textbook authors.

• ... linguists and researchers.

• ... learners and teachers.

Answer explanation

Learners and teachers use direct corpora applications in the classroom (page 113).

One of the following is a specialised corpus of academic spoken English:

• The BNC

• The ANC

• The MICASE

• The COCA

Answer explanation

MICASE is the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (1.7 million words). The others are the British National Corpus, the American National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

What does CCEC stand for?

• Cambridge Corpus English Course

• Cambridge COBUILD English Course

• Collins COBUILD English Course

• Corpus and Concordance English Course

Answer explanation

The CCEC is a corpus-driven lexical syllabus that contains the most common words and phrases in English.

Corpus analysis has discovered a grammatical feature of English that is misrespresented in EFL textbooks:

• The progressive is more frequent than expected in repeated actions.

• "If" and "in case" are actually used synonymously.

• The passive voice is a lot less common than we thought.

• The progressive is surprisingly common in continuous events.

Answer explanation

The progressive is usually explained as the aspect of continuous events (the children are playing), but in real life it is frequently used for repeated actions (I'm taking more showers these days).

Which work had a great influence on curriculum design?

• Corpus Concordance Collocation

• COBUILD Grammar Patterns

• English for Specific Purposes

• General Service List of English Words

Michael West's corpus-inspired, pioneering work The General Service List of English Words (1953) was a...

• ... compilation of frequently used post-war code expressions.

• ... teaching syllabus based on words rather than grammatical constructions.

• ... practical set of bilingual materials for learners of English.

• ... teaching plan initially designed to help Commonwealth immigrants learn English.

Answer explanation

A syllabus with focus on FREQUENT lexical items rather than grammar expressions (lexis and grammar are inseparable, i.e. language is a series of repetitive word-combinations). Now we now that frequency is not the only factor for learnability.

Pawler and Syder have emphasized the importance of recurring word combinations because they foster ...

• fluency, vocabulary and accuracy

• vocabulary, idomaticity and fluency

• accuracy, fluency and idiomaticity

• accuracy, idiomaticity and vocabulary

Answer explanation

Information on phraseology (combinations that individual words favour) are still largely missing from coursebooks.

Learner corpora are compiled of ...

• Language produced by the language learners

• Language found in coursebooks

• Language found in learner dictionaries

• Language produced by the teacher

A method in which there is an interaction between the learner and the corpus is referred to as ...

• LSP

• DDL

• AWL

• LCC

Answer explanation

DDL - data-driven learning. An example of that method is that learners could be asked to compile concordances of a pair of near-synonyms (such as ‘speak’ and ‘talk’ in English and work out the differences in the collocational and phraseological behaviour of these words.

Corpora are considered to have a greater potential knowledge of the language than the average native speaker.

• True

• False