THANKS A LOT…

"I heard your name last year for the first time, to be honest, you did not make sense for me. You were even too nonsense for me.

When I first heard about you this year, you seemed to be so strange that I did not understand what you were for at all. I still do not know so much about you, I have just a little knowledge about you. What I know is that you are so comprehensive and vast to explore. "

Accept this writing as a dept of gratitude.

Yes, you are “Corpus Linguistics”. Shortly, I would like to say CL to you.

You date back to thirteenth century when the words in Christian Bible were scrutinized and manually indexed. You are exactly much older than meJ. Before you found your way in terminology, the term “corpus” had long been in use to refer to a collection or binding together of written works of a similar nature. You, CL, came into common usage in the early 1980s. In many ways, you were born in an attempt to adequately describe and analyze contemporary language use based on naturally occurring language data (Gries et al. 2010).

You, CL, are being used in the pursuit of broader research questions: in areas such as language teaching and learning, discourse analysis, literary stylistics, forensic linguistics, pragmatics, speech technology, sociolinguistics and health communication, among others.  In this sense, you have much to offer other areas by providing a better means of doing things. So, you are a means to an end rather than an end in yourself (O’ Keffe& McCarty, 2010). You are so far away from your infancy days anymore.

Great changes came together with you. I do not want to list them here as everyone is more or less aware of your potential. What I want to focus specifically is that a girl made a mini research using concordancing. You enabled so many facilities for her that I would like to cite about them shortly.

1. Before making her mini research, she employed one of your soft wares, AntConc. So, she could easily select texts according to things like their potential to maximize exposure to target form, their level or content. Thanks a lot…

2. What is more important than this is exactly the contextual support AntConc provided via concordance lists. Thanks to concordance lists, she could easily reach and evaluate target items in their own contexts. Thanks a lot…

3. In fact, it is impossible to think of spoken fluency without having at our disposal hundreds of ready- made chunks. Learning to recognize and use language chunks can help learners to become more fluent. Thanks to one of your tools, AntConc, she became aware of how vagueness tags, a kind of ready- made chunks, are used in spoken language. Thanks a lot…

4. You provided illustrative, authentic, realistic, up- to date data for her. But for your help, her results would be decontextualized and it would lack an empirical basis. Thanks a lot…

5. You have other applications, too. With you, that any item may have a number of different uses gives us the chance of identifying which uses of items to present. With your support, she could scrutinize functions of “and so on”. So, she could find more specific and relevant examples for her research. Thanks a lot…

6. Apart from a quantitative analysis, you also offer qualitative analysis. Again, of course with your help, she could examine in which cases vagueness tags are used with pragmatic marker “you know”. You raised her awareness of aspects of the target language which are in need of attention. Thanks a lot…

7. Osborne (2004) employs two approaches, what are termed the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ in his study. The top-down approach refers to ‘drawing data from a native-speaker corpus to provide evidence of target usage to increase learners’ awareness of the language’, and the bottom-up approach refers to ‘drawing data from a learner corpus and using the learners’ own productions as a starting point for error correction and gradual enrichment. She could interpret both native language usage and also question her own language use comparing it with native speakers’ language usage. She could get new insights towards target language. Thanks a lot…

At all, you were applied to achieve some particular goals rather than used to describe the language features of a corpus. THANKS A LOT...

REFERENCES

Gries, S. Th., Wulff, S., Davies, M. (2010). Corpus Linguistic Applications Current Studies,  New Directions. New York: Amsterdam.

O’Keffe, A. & McCarty, M. (2010). The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics. New York: Routledge.

Osborne, J. (2004) ‘Top-down and Bottom-up Approaches to Corpora in Language Teaching’,       in U. Connor and T. A. Upton (eds) Applied Corpus Linguistics. A Multidimensional   Perspective. London: Rodopi, pp. 251–65.

V. C. FOR TEN YEARS

“This is a short conversation with Vahide CEYLAN who is studying at preparation class. It is about her language learning experience in general.”

H: For how many years have you been learning English?

V: I have been learning English for ten years.

H: Can you mention about your language learning experience shortly?

V: I started learning English when I was ten years old at primary school. I am graduated from teacher training high school and I took an intense language education there for 4 years. Now, I am studying at H. U. I have been taking more intense education than I did at high school. What I experience is that learning a language is an easy process. But how we are taught makes it challenging, hard, and long. So, not only I but also almost everyone in Turkey is not able enough in English.

H: Is there any specific experience of yours to mention?

V: When I hear a new teacher speaking, I am usually shocked because of her/his accent Sometimes, I even do think that s/he is not speaking English. “purpose, of course, quickly, focus, hope, years etc” are some definite examples which make me confused when my teacher pronounces them.

H: Do you find English difficult or easy to learn? Why difficult or why easy?

V: It is an easy language to learn. As I stated above, how we are taught English makes it hard. If you ask me how I decided that, my cousins in Saudi Arabia can use both English and France very well even though they do not get a formal education. They know English even better than me. One of them was shocked when she heard that I cannot speak English as fluently as her even though I have been learning English for ten years. So, she usually laughs at me.

H: If you graded your ability in English from 0- 10 generally, what would be your point for yourself? Why?

V: It would be 6. I am good at grammar and reading; however, basic skills listening and speaking are not so good.

H: If you graded your success in four skills from 0- 10, how would it be? Which skill do you find the most challenging and easiest? Why?

V:  Reading- 8

Writing- 7

Listening- 4

Speaking- 5

Reading is the easiest one because I can deduce unknown words from context or I look them up in a dictionary. What is more, I think that I am good at grammar because of focus of language education in Turkey. So, reading is not a big matter. Listening is the most difficult one since my attention span is low. Besides, flow of information is listening is really fast, so I cannot catch necessary and relevant information.

H: How do you feel yourself while speaking English in the classroom?

V: I am afraid of speaking English because I feel as if everyone is looking for my errors. I think that I do not speak English because of my pronunciation. That is the most important factor that makes me not to speak in front of classroom.

H: Have you ever used (four skills) English outside the classroom? If yes, where? With whom? How did you feel?

V: I spoke with a foreign student in our campus when I paid money for her on the bus. I felt myself happy because it was a good experience to realize that I could use English outside the classroom.

H: What is your plan for the future with English? Is it a “means” or “goal” for the future?

V: Learning a language is exactly a “means” and also “goal” for me. It is a “goal” for me because I am interested in learning English as a hobby. If I were at another department, I even would learn English. It is a “means” for me because I would like to learn about other cultures and meet new people thanks to English. To be honest, I also want to earn money.

H: Thanks for your ideas, Vahide.

V: Not at all.

“That is all for language learning experience of Vahide CEYLAN for now on. It seems to be that she has more or less the same experiences with anyone who is learning English in Turkey.” (For relevant and detailed information, you can read “Am I Problematic?”)