Douglas Biber
Susan Conrad
Corpus Linguistics and Grammar Teaching
These leading experts describe what corpus linguistics is and how it affects language teachers and their textbooks.
What follows is an excerpt from the beginning of Dr. Biber and Dr. Conrad’’s article. Click here to get the full version. Then, get more information about their new book, Real Grammar, and check out a sample unit.
1. Why do grammar teachers need corpus-based studies?
Speaking with English teachers and students throughout the world, we have discovered that most of them believe that the authors of their textbooks had some special source of information to help them write the book. This information ”they believe” made clear to the textbook author what content to cover and how to cover it. With this source of information, the coverage in the book must be correct, useful, and realistic, right?
Unfortunately, no special source of information for textbook writers exists. Authors’ intuition, anecdotal evidence, and traditions about what should be in a grammar book play major roles in determining the content of textbooks. This usually works just fine for basic descriptions of grammatical structure. The intuition of a native speaker or a couple examples is sufficient evidence for how to form accurate grammatical structures in English. For example, intuition or anecdotal evidence work well to tell which verbs are irregular, to describe the way to form perfect aspect verb phrases, or to list the relative pronouns that are possible in English.
However, as any experienced English teacher can attest, accurately describing how to form grammatical structures is only a small part of grammar teaching. And like teachers, textbook writers must make myriad decisions. An author must decide how to sequence the grammatical information: Which features should be presented in the first chapters versus features to discuss in later chapters versus features to exclude because there is no room to discuss them at all?
Similarly, the author must decide how much space to devote to each feature. At a more detailed level, the author must decide how to illustrate the targeted grammatical features in example sentences e.g., what contexts to use and what specific words to use in the grammatical structure (e.g. what verbs to use to illustrate past tense).
Get More
The full article by Biber and Conrad is available on the Pearson Longman USA website. Dr. Biber and Dr. Conrad have written a new book for grammar teachers called Real Grammar. Check out a sample unit, and contact your Pearson ELL Specialist for more information.
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