SÍNTESIS Y PERSPECTIVAS

Corpora have for a long time been used to study the written mode of a language, as written languages are easier to compile than spoken languages, which call for time-consuming and laborious transcribing process. Recently, the emergence of a number of corpora dedicated to spoken language (e.g. MICASE, BASE and CANCODE) has rapidly increased studies of spoken English. Corpora have been applied in several areas in Applied Linguistics, for example, the production of reference books and packages for learners and writers, critical linguistics, translation studies, literary studies and stylistics, forensic linguistics and ELT (Hunston 2002). Results from corpus research have made a substantial contribution to four areas in ELT: syllabus design, course design, materials and language teaching methodology.

Corpora have been available for more than forty years. The studies of corpora have changed the ways in which we look at language and what the language is like. Until the recent decade, corpora have received the attention they deserve and have informed syllabus design (Sinclair 2004b: 1). For instance, the lexical syllabus originally proposed by Sinclair and Renouf (1988) and later highlighted by Willis (1990) lists lexical items for learning in order of frequency. The frequently-used items are presented with their phraseologies and contexts.

In addition to contributing to syllabus design, corpus research helps teachers and curriculum developers tailor courses to meet learners‟ needs. Comparing learner corpora with NS ones has identified the aspects which learners have difficulty with and the aspects they already know (e.g. studies in Granger (1998c), Tankó (2004)). Small and specialised corpora have been used to investigate language in a particular domain and this helps learners to understand the disciplinary use of English (Tribble 1997: 112-113).

Corpora have been used to develop teaching and learning materials, which have enriched language teaching and learning. Based on corpora and the task-based learning and teaching (TBLT) approach, Collins COBUILD English Course series (Willis and Willis 1988) is probably the first coursebook of this kind. Recently, corpus-informed coursebooks, such as the Touchstone series (McCarthy, McCarten and Sandiford 2006) and Top Notch series (Saslow and Ascher 2006) have become available. Studies of NS and learner corpora have

also aided the development of dictionaries for learners, e.g. Collins COBUILD (e.g. Collins

COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary (Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary 2006)) and Longman (e.g. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

(Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 2009)) dictionaries. In the development of these teaching and learning materials, NS corpus studies offer information about frequency, collocations and NS usages. Learner corpus studies reveal frequent learner errors for teachers to look out for. Additionally, corpora are good sources for making one‟s own materials to enrich learning (Aston 1997). Materials prepared by teachers, if based on concordance lines, give learners chances to explore the language and notice what can be learned about the node word(s) (Hunston 2002: 177-179).

In addition to the areas of syllabus design, course design and materials, corpora influence teaching methodology. An often-quoted approach relating to the use of corpora is Johns‟s data-driven learning (DDL) (1991). The principle of DDL is for learners acting as researchers and working on corpus data to make discoveries about language instead of learning from the explicit instructions of the teacher. As Hunston (2002: 184-187) suggests, DDL can be used as a consciousness-raising activity in the Language Focus stage of the TBTL cycle.

Not only do corpora make contributions to the areas of ELT, but they can be used also to investigate the localisation of English. In a non-native variety of English, the use of DMs in speech is one of the important features. It is a good candidate for investigating the localisation of English because 1) using DMs says nothing about right and wrong in relation to syntax and semantics; 2) neither sentence grammar nor semantics has had much to say about DMs; and 3) the functions of DMs are difficult to define and they are probably culture specific and context dependent.

I am now to draw a distinction between the two terms learners and NNSs. The Chinese speakers of English in the SECCL corpus used in this study are, on the one hand, learners and on the other, NNSs because the variety of language they are speaking is quite possibly a non-native variety of English. Two views are taken in this thesis. In some contexts, in particular in the research which considers the subjects‟ competence vis-à-vis NS competence and in the discussion of pedagogy, it makes sense to talk about the speakers as learners. However, in my study of DMs, the problem with addressing the Chinese speakers of English as learners is that this implies that their use of DMs is not taken as a target feature of non-native English and they are incompetent at using DMs. To avoid implanting prejudice to

my Chinese speaker data, I tend then to call them NNSs, which means that I can examine the use of DMs without making a judgment about accuracy and correctness. In the chapter of pedagogical implications and applications, they are called learners.

The issue of whether NNSs should speak like NSs in learning spoken English is still under debate. This has been shown in the increasing interest in English as a lingua franca (e.g. Mauranen (2003b, 2006, 2007), Prodromou (2008) and Seidlhofer (2001, 2004)). I argue in this thesis that while NNSs should not be punished for not speaking like NSs, competent NNSs should use the target language appropriately in the given context and if they wish, they can keep their cultural identities, as long as their NNS language causes no misunderstanding and impedes the development of no interpersonal relations. Meanwhile, they should be aware of how NSs express themselves in a particular context.

This thesis argues that in addition to teaching Chinese users of English to use DMs differently, NSs should be encouraged to acknowledge the use of DMs made by NNSs and the global community of English speakers can be educated in the acceptance of a local variety. Taking the use of DMs made by NNSs as a feature of a local variety raises the question of what the target norm of the teaching and learning of English should be. As has been argued, NNSs do not need to sound like NSs (Prodromou 1996) and since English has become the lingua franca in Asia and other regions of the world, it is worth reconsidering whether the NS usages of DMs should be taken as the targets for NNS who want to improve their communicative competence or whether NNS usages should be acknowledged as acceptable features of an emerging variety of English in their own right.

This chapter has outlined the present study and given background information; it will be followed by a comprehensive survey of the relevant literature on Corpus Linguistics, DMs and the LUG analysis (Sinclair and Mauranen 2006).