Corpora for Linguists vs. Corpora for Learners

• Main Authors: Forti, Luciana, Spina, Stefania
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari 2019-04-01
• Series: Educazione Linguistica Language Education
• Subjects: DDL. LCR. Italian L2. Collocations. Pedagogical materials design.
• Online Access: https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/riviste/elle/2019/2/corpora-for-linguists-vs-corpora-for-learners/

This paper aims to shed light on how research findings stemming from Learner Corpus Research (LCR) can inform the development of Data-driven learning (DDL) pedagogical activities. By doing this, it seeks to show how the gap between corpora built to be used by linguists and those tailored for learners can be filled. It starts by defining what a corpus is and how second language learning studies can benefit from the research findings based on corpora, but also from the direct use of corpora in the classroom. Then, it provides an overview of the available native and learner corpora of Italian, and how corpora in general can be adapted for DDL purposes. Finally, it describes an example of how an LCR finding can be used to develop DDL activities. It concludes with some desiderata for the future.