XXVIII Congreso Internacional de AESLA
Analysing data > Describing variation

Sylviane Granger

Biodata

Sylviane Granger is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). She is the director of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, where research activity is focused on the compilation and exploitation of learner corpora and bilingual corpora. In 1990 she launched the International Corpus of Learner English project, which has grown to contain learner writing by learners of English from 19 different mother tongue backgrounds and is the result of collaboration from a large number of universities internationally. She has written numerous articles and (co-)edited several volumes on learner corpus research and gives frequent invited talks, seminars and workshops to stimulate the field and promote its application to ELT materials design and development. Her latest research centres on phraseology, the grammar-lexis interface, English for Academic Purposes and lexicography. Her publications include Learner English on Computer (1998), Computer Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching (Granger et al eds. 2002), Lexis in Contrast. Corpus-based Approaches (Altenberg & Granger eds 2002), Corpus-based Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies (Granger et al eds. 2003), Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Granger & Meunier eds. 2008), Phraseology in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching (Meunier & Granger eds. 2008) and eLexicography in the 21st century: New challenges, new applications (Granger & Paquot in press).

 

Abstract

“Corpus research, variation and teaching: infernal trio or happy threesome?”

One of the major contributions of corpus-based research is the light it has thrown on language variation. The impact of variation studies is beginning to show in a range of fields, in particular foreign language learning and teaching. As regards English, for example, our enhanced knowledge of geographical varieties has raised awareness of the crucial issue of what constitutes the target norm, while register studies are changing our perspective on what should be used as content in teaching. In the field of lexis, corpus studies have shown that the most fixed units of language display a high degree of variation (cf. Moon, 1998) and also revealed that, in addition to its stock of truly idiomatic phrases, English is characterized by a wide range of patterns of recurrence and co-occurrence (Granger & Paquot, 2008). In the field of grammar, the pioneering Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al, 1999) has highlighted marked differences in both frequency and patterning in four registers of English. As regards academic writing, the marked differences brought out by corpus studies in different fields (biology, history, medicine, linguistics, etc.) have led Hyland & Tse (2007) to question the very existence and general usefulness of the concept of general academic vocabulary.

The emergence of variation as a dominant feature of language poses tremendous challenges to language learning and teaching. On the one hand, teachers and materials designers feel they ought to do justice to the variability of language, but at the same time, they – rightly – feel the need to generalize, to ‘cut corners’, both for theoretical reasons (learnability) and practical reasons (limited time). The analysis of learner corpora has uncovered another type of variation that further compounds the issue. While a few years ago, it was still customary to speak of learner English, in-depth analysis of learner corpora has made it increasingly clear that we would do better to speak of ‘learner Englishes’ (Gilquin & Granger, forthcoming). Alongside a yet-to-be-defined common core, learner languages have a large number of specific features, often related to the learners’ L1, but also influenced by other variables such as teaching methods, degree of exposure, etc.

In my presentation I will demonstrate how one could go about integrating information about variation gathered from a minute investigation of both native and learner corpora into the two major types of ELT reference books, i.e. grammars and dictionaries. The two learner corpora used are the second version of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al, 2009) and the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes Database, a new learner corpus collected at Louvain, which contains ESP texts written by L2 learners from various mother tongue backgrounds.

References

  • Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman: Harlow.
  • Gilquin, G.  & Granger, S. (forthcoming). From EFL to ESL: Evidence from the International Corpus of Learner English. In Hundt, M. & Mukherjee, D. (eds.) Exploring Second-Language Varieties of English and Learner Englishes: Bridging a Paradigm Gap. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.
  • Granger, S., Dagneaux, E., Meunier, F. and Paquot, M. (2009). The International Corpus of Learner English. Version 2. Handbook and CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Available from http://www.i6doc.com
  • Granger, S.  & Paquot, M. (2008). Disentangling the phraseological web. In Granger, S. & Meunier, F. (eds.) Phraseology: An interdisciplinary perspective. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 27-49.
  • Hyland, K. and Tse, P. (2007). Is there an “Academic Vocabulary”. TESOL Quarterly, 41, (2), 235-253.
  • Moon, R. (1998). Fixed expressions and idioms in English. A corpus-based approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press.