The Language Teacher
July 2003
Corpus-Driven Grammar and the ELT Syllabus
Terry Shortall
University of Birmingham
For many years, there has been an argument as to how, and indeed whether, we should teach grammar. Essentially, there are three positions. Firstly, there is the Krashen (1985) approach, which holds that there is no need to teach grammar as learners will acquire grammar subliminally as they are exposed to appropriate and comprehensible input. Secondly, there is the Focus-on-Form (FOF) position (Long, 1991; Long & Robinson, 1998), which suggests that grammar items should be taught as they arise naturally in interaction and/or (authentic) text; this position fits in with Task-Based Learning (TBL) (see Willis, 1996; Skehan, 1998). Finally, there is the traditional approach that involves teaching lists of structures in sequence, an approach still common in modern textbooks; this involves presenting, for example, the present continuous in one unit, the present simple in the next, the past simple in another unit, and so on.
Although the traditional method of teaching lists of grammar items does not reflect natural acquisition (after all, when learning a language, we do not go around speaking in the present simple on one day and the past simple on another), there are pedagogic and practical reasons for such an approach. Most textbooks still offer lists of structures partly because this allows teachers to establish clear objectives and plan their lessons with ease (Richards, 2001), and it provides learners with transparent and tangible goals. I will examine examples of textbook grammar here and suggest how these can more closely reflect grammar as used in real-life communication.
If we look at the existential structure, in sentences beginning with There is/are, we can see some of the problems with textbook grammar. A very common example found in textbooks is the sentence There is a book on the table. We can see how this is pedagogically easy to teach: the two nouns, book and table, are concrete and have easily identifiable referents, and the preposition on is also easy for a teacher to explain, so in this sense, this is a very easy sentence for learners to process. The problem with this sentence is that it is contrived for teaching purposes, and would not qualify as an example of authentic language as used in real-world communication (Little, 1997). Indeed, if you can imagine walking into a room full of people, pointing to a book on the table, and saying "There is a book on the table," you can see that this sentence can be quite absurd in some contexts.
We can now look at how the existential structure is represented in a corpus, which is a computer database of language. The biggest corpus in the world is The University of Birmingham's Bank of English (BofE), with over 450 million words. The examples I show below are from the 20-million word subcorpus of spoken British English. Sentences from the corpus show how complex real language is:
- This is a bullet for which there is a target.
- There's something a bit novel about training on a ship.
- There's no doubt that he is one of our most talented players.
In authentic language, there are more abstract nouns (something, doubt, training). More importantly, there is greater structural variety. In textbook existentials, we get simple prepositional phrases like on the desk and in the box. In real English, we get inversion as in Sentence 1, complex prepositional phrases as in Sentence 2, and that clauses as in Sentence 3.
I am not suggesting here that we don''t use contrived sentences of the kind we so often see in textbooks; after all, these are useful for illustrating grammatical patterns. What I am saying is that textbooks should also strive to include example sentences that are based on corpus-analysed authentic language. In this way, we can use contrived sentences to introduce grammatical structures, with authentic examples to show how these structures are used in real-world communication.
We can also see how this phenomenon works in the comparative-superlative structures. In textbooks, this usually involves teaching, for example, tall-taller-tallest and interesting-more interesting-most interesting. If we now examine the 20 most frequent adjectives in English (as listed in Leech, Rayson & Wilson's 2001 analysis of the British National Corpus) we find some surprising data in our spoken corpus. If we look at the adjective big, we find that the stem big accounts for 84% of occurrences, bigger for just under 10%, and biggest for 6.5%. For all adjectives, the figures are: stem at 86%, comparative at 9.9%, and superlative at 2.6%. This would suggest that people do not make very many comparisons. But this is not the case, of course. In real-world communication, comparisons are made all the time; it's just that they do not only involve adjectives. We can see this clearly if we look at how more patterns in the corpus. Two nouns, money and people, are more frequent than any adjective:
. . . the people today they must have more money than sense because if they're going to . . .
. . . You know you're going to have more people sitting in the waiting room than in the . . .
Nouns are used in almost 25% of comparisons with more, while adjectives only account for 18%. What this means is that in teaching the comparative-superlative forms of adjectives, textbooks often fail to provide the learner with examples of comparison mechanisms that include nouns.
Textbooks generally use contrived sentences to illustrate grammatical patterns; these sentences often fail to reflect real language usage, as we have seen with the existential structure. Nevertheless, contrived sentences may be useful pedagogic devices as they are easy for learners to process. What I am suggesting is that textbooks should also include corpus-based examples of authentic language, as this will give learners contact with the kind of language they will meet in the real world.
At the same time, textbooks often under-describe language functions; the teaching of comparatives and superlatives of adjectives does not give learners all of the mechanisms they will need to replicate real-world comparison language. And again I am suggesting that corpus-based language can fill that gap and can make textbook grammar more accurately reflect the way grammar is used in authentic communication.
References
Krashen, S. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. New York: Longman.
Leech, G., Rayson, P., & Wilson, A. (2001). Word frequencies in written and spoken English. London: Longman.
Little, D. (1997). Responding authentically to authentic texts: A problem for self access language learning? In P. Benson & P. Voller (Eds.), Autonomy and independence in language learning. London: Longman.
Long, M. (1991). Focus on form: A design feature in language teaching methodology. In K. de Bot, R. Ginsberg, & C. Kramsch (Eds.), Foreign language research in cross-cultural perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Long, M., & Robinson, P. (1998). Focus on form: Theory, research and practice. In C. Doughty & J. Williams (Eds.), Focus on form in classroom SLA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richards, J. C. (2001). Curriculum development in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skehan, P. (1998). A cognitive approach to language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Willis, J. (1996). A framework for task-based learning. London: Longman.
Terry Shortall is a lecturer at the Centre for English Language Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. He teaches MA courses in TEFL/TESL and Applied Linguistics, and is co-ordinator of the MA TEFL/TESL Open Distance Learning programme for Japan. He has lectured and taught EFL in Japan, Brazil, and Portugal. He is Reviews Editor of the journal Language Awareness (Multilingual Matters).
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