At one level of analysis corpora may be categorized as being monolingual, bilingual or multilingual. Within the field of foreign language teaching, ‘monolingual’ is equatable with ‘L2’. In the current paper it is suggested, by contrast, that a monolingual L1 corpus may also be of some benefit in foreign language teaching. Three general areas of possible use for an L1 corpus are identified, all involving translation into the second language (TSL): (1) as a source of contexts for specific grammatical items of language which it is useful to approach from the point of view of TSL; (2) as a source of contextualized examples to help in developing awareness of certain types of interlingual difference; (3) as a source of passages for translation. For the first of these two uses, I include examples of classroom activities. Although the main focus of this article is on the exploitation of a stand-alone monolingual corpus, I also comment on whether it would be useful to have access to a bilingual corpus, whether comparable or translation. Exemplification at all times considers Italian as the L1 and English as the L2; none of the points made, however, are intended to be language-pair specific. The corpus from which L1 examples are taken is a 20-million word corpus of contemporary written Italian.
Some ways in which an L1 corpus may be of benefit in foreign language learning
COFFEY, STEPHEN JAMES
2000-01-01
Abstract
At one level of analysis corpora may be categorized as being monolingual, bilingual or multilingual. Within the field of foreign language teaching, ‘monolingual’ is equatable with ‘L2’. In the current paper it is suggested, by contrast, that a monolingual L1 corpus may also be of some benefit in foreign language teaching. Three general areas of possible use for an L1 corpus are identified, all involving translation into the second language (TSL): (1) as a source of contexts for specific grammatical items of language which it is useful to approach from the point of view of TSL; (2) as a source of contextualized examples to help in developing awareness of certain types of interlingual difference; (3) as a source of passages for translation. For the first of these two uses, I include examples of classroom activities. Although the main focus of this article is on the exploitation of a stand-alone monolingual corpus, I also comment on whether it would be useful to have access to a bilingual corpus, whether comparable or translation. Exemplification at all times considers Italian as the L1 and English as the L2; none of the points made, however, are intended to be language-pair specific. The corpus from which L1 examples are taken is a 20-million word corpus of contemporary written Italian.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
