Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Language Teaching Research
This Article
Right arrow Free Full Text (Free PDF) Free
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Shirato, J.
Right arrow Articles by Stapleton, P.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Comparing English vocabulary in a spoken learner corpus with a native speaker corpus: Pedagogical implications arising from an empirical study in Japan

Junko Shirato

Hokkaido University, Japan, shirato{at}imc.hokudai.ac.jp

Paul Stapleton

Hokkaido University, Japan, paulstapleton{at}gmail.com

Insights from corpus linguistics have come to be seen as having a significant impact in second language pedagogy. Learner corpora, or collections of texts spoken or written by non-native speakers (NNS) of a language, are now being used for the purposes of enhancing language teaching. Specifically, by comparing the corpus of NNS with native speakers (NS) it is possible to identify instances of learners' under- or over-use of spoken vocabulary, as well as to investigate how far, and in what ways learners deviate from NS's norms. This preliminary study compares a small NNS corpus of 43,651 words with an established NS corpus. Results revealed that the Japanese NNS differed markedly in many areas, especially in their underuse of certain lexical items such as discourse markers, modal items, adjectives for specific evaluations, some interactive words, delexical verbs and terms for marking vagueness and hedges. On the other hand, NNS overused some high frequency and auxiliary verbs and some common adjectives. From this data, we suggest that knowledge from learner corpora has important pedagogical implications which include giving higher priority to certain classes of vocabulary including multi-word clusters that appear to be underused among Japanese learners.

Language Teaching Research, Vol. 11, No. 4, 393-412 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1362168807080960
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?