A corpus-aided discovery learning (CADL) approach to teaching collocations in TEFL settings

Despite the progress made in the field of corpus linguistics, the use of corpora is relatively scarce in language pedagogy (Krieger, 2003). However, the effectiveness of using corpus-based activities in teaching English has been supported by researchers (Vannestal and Lindquist, 2007). This paper discusses the potential of using a corpus-aided discovery learning (CADL) approach in TEFL settings, particularly in teaching collocations (i.e. habitual cooccurrences of lexical items). There is consensus that the study of collocations is vital for developing language skills and fostering fluency and accuracy (e.g. Biber et al.,1999; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; McAlpine & Myles, 2003) since competence in a language undoubtedly involves collocational knowledge (Herbst, 1996: 389). Evidently, learners’ knowledge of collocations is quite important (Kita and Ogata, 1997: 230) and is needed for effective sentence generation (Smadja and McKeown, 1990) and avoidance of errors (McAlpine and Myles, 2003: 75). In this paper, we argue that using a CADL approach and involving learners in corpus-based activities in the study of collocations would extend their lexicon. To support this argument, the researchers initiated an experiment applying a CADL approach to the teaching of vocabulary, particularly collocations, in the Faculty of Education, Tanta University, Egypt. 20 third-year students were introduced to the BNC[1] web and were given a hands-on session on how to use the BNC. Then, learners were asked to look at the concordances of the most frequent 10 nouns in the BNC, namely: ‘time’, ‘people’, ‘way’, ‘years’, ‘year’, ‘work’, ‘government’, ‘day’, ‘man’, and ‘world’; to decide which adjectives most frequently occur with these nouns; to extract collocates for each noun; and to discuss their findings with their colleagues. This is followed by a number of exercises in which students use the collocates they have found. The aim of the study, or as Chambers (2007) and Mukherjee (2004) call it ‘task’, is to ‘popularise’ the work with corpus data in TEFL settings. Hence, language learners would not rely solely on the teacher but would deal with corpora on their own under the teacher's guidance and find out about language patterning and the behaviour of words and phrases in an ‘autonomous’ way (Bernardini, 2002: 165).