Exploiting the Textual Database

A number of exploitation activities have been implemented in the context of several of the courses mentioned above. Some of them focused on the analysis of the individual texts in the corpus and on ‘whole-corpus reading’

(Henry and Roseberry 2001), thus becoming the source for teaching mate-rials. Other activities were based on direct access to the database by stu-dents. In the following subsections we describe some examples of these activities.

10.4.1 Some examples of exploitation activities

Example 1: Aspectual distinctions in English and Spanish Purpose of the activity

This activity was planned in the context of the Contrastive Linguistics course and was designed to contrast aspectual distinctions about past state of affairs in English and Spanish. The purpose of the activity was to make students apply theoretical notions learnt in class about the different types of Aktionsart, how they interact with various grammatical aspects in a past-time environ-ment and its infl uence on the selection of tenses in English and Spanish.

Figure 10.3 Web display of translation units

For this activity one single text was chosen: a fragment of over 1,000 from Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and its translation into Spanish. The main reason for selecting this text was that it contained a good number of Past tenses with different translations into Spanish, which made it particularly suitable for the purposes of the activity. The activity consisted of several phases:

Phase 1

The students received a questionnaire that they should apply to each verb form in the Past tense in the text. The questionnaire consisted of the following questions:

Which tense would you use to translate the verb?

1.

What is the

2. Akstionsart of the state of affairs? How do you know?

What is the grammatical aspect of the verb? How do you know?

3.

Is the subject defi nite or indefi nite?

4.

Is the complement defi nite or indefi nite?

5.

Are there time circumstantials? If so, of what type?

6.

Is there a match between your translation and the one provided by the 7.

corpus? If not, which one is more accurate? Why?

The questions were aimed at helping the students identifying the factors potentially responsible for the translator’s choice, such as the stativity and telicity of the situation, the presence of defi nite or indefi nite subjects or direct objects, pragmatics factors or knowledge of the world. The compari-son between the translation proposed by the students and that provided by the corpus also raised their awareness about the semantic contrast between tenses in Spanish.

Phase 2

After fi lling in the questionnaire, the students shared the results, discussed the discrepancies and were asked to write a fi nal report with the conclu-sions that could be drawn about the factors responsible for tense selection in English and Spanish.

The next two activities involved direct access to the database by stu-dents. Figure 10.4 below shows a partial view of the Applied Linguistics site on the UCM Virtual Campus, with a direct link to the activity that is described next.

144 Corpus-Based Approaches to English Language Teaching

Example 2: Practice in contrastive discourse analysis Purpose of the activity

This activity, involving 28 students, was carried out in the context of the Applied Linguistics course as part of the curriculum of the degree in English Studies. It allowed practice in a number of applied areas in linguis-tics (e.g. corpus linguislinguis-tics, contrastive linguislinguis-tics, translation and discourse analysis), as will be explained in the description of the activity. This activity was compulsory as it represented the two credits corresponding to the Academic Activities of the course. The activity consisted of different phases:

Phase 1

Students were asked to choose one original text from the corpus and carry out a contrastive analysis with its corresponding translation in terms of either of the following: context analysis, topicality and thematic progression, rhetorical structures analysis or genre analysis.

Phase 2

Regarding context analysis, students had to trace how the contextual variables of fi eld, tenor and mode were linguistically realized in English and Spanish. For topicality and thematic progression, their task was to compare different patterns of topical thematization for the same clauses in each Figure 10.4 Partial view of the online Applied Linguistics course

language, e.g. whether both languages thematized the same or different experiential constituents. Those choosing rhetorical structure analysis would have to compare the rhetorical devices employed by each language to arrange the clause constituents in terms of the Theme/Rheme and Given/New structures. In the case of genre analysis – the most challenging choice – students were supposed to compare both texts in terms of their register confi guration, schematic structure and realizational patterns.

Phase 3

They were to write a 3,000 word paper which would be submitted to their instructor via email by a given date. Before the paper submission, the students had to give a 15-minute oral presentation where they explained their most relevant fi ndings.

Example 3: Testing students on semantic analysis through the use of new technologies

Purpose of the activity

This activity, involving 30 students of a course on English Semantics, represented an innovative type of take-home fi nal exam for the subject.

Using the date offi cially assigned to the fi nal exam as deadline for its submission, the exam was a take-home in the sense that students did not have to sit in a classroom to take it; it was innovative because it involved the use of new technologies for its completion. The activity consisted of several phases.

Phase 1

Students were instructed in this case to work exclusively with the English texts from the corpus, following the instruction given in the exam for the English Semantics course.

Phase 2

The exams were submitted, as an attachment, to the instructor by the due date.

Phase 3

The instructor corrected them on the computer, using blue and red to highlight slight and big mistakes, respectively.

146 Corpus-Based Approaches to English Language Teaching

Phase 4

After the correction, students had their exams returned to them, again via email, with the corresponding grade.

10.4.2 Evaluation of the activities

For the evaluation of the tasks, students were requested to fi ll in an anony-mous questionnaire. The feedback on the activities was highly satisfactory in general. The immense majority acknowledged that the activities had been quite stimulating and expressed the wish that this kind of practice be extended to other subjects. Students were particularly enthusiastic about the exam activity. Among the reported advantages of this type of examina-tion, perhaps the most outstanding is the lowering of anxiety as opposed to traditional exams and the ‘cleanliness’ of the method, environmentally speaking, since no paper whatsoever was used in the whole process. On the negative side, a few students found that their limited computer-skills negatively affected their performance.

Regarding activities 2 and 3, i.e. those involving direct access to the database by students, a good deal of students admitted that these turned out to be harder than they had originally expected. The students’ tasks were in principle facilitated by the fact that they ‘simply’ had to apply the theory and analyses explained in class to the texts they chose. However, linguistic analysis based on exposure to whole texts from the database turned out to be harder than the use of selected extracts by the instructor to illustrate the points under consideration. For many of them this was their fi rst exposure to linguistic analysis of authentic language data. The diffi culty in applying theory to real corpus data also fostered discussion among students and emphasized the sense that there was not a single correct answer or analysis, as every theoretical framework has problematic cases which cannot be handled without debate.