E303 Corpustasks

Supplementary Material Faculty of Education and Language Studies: Level 3 E303 English Grammar in Context

E303

Corpus Tasks (UK)
Prepared for the course team by Martin Wynne and Kieran O’Halloran

Contents
Introduction for Book 1 Unit 2 Unit 3 Unit 6 Introduction for Book 2 Unit 8 Unit 10 Introduction for Book 3 Introduction for Book 4 Unit 17 Unit 18 Unit 21 References Acknowledgements and credits 3 5 18 27 34 35 42 52 56 57 61 65 67 67

Copyright # 2007 The Open University 2.1

SUP 81764 5

Introduction for Book 1
Introduction
When you were exploring the differences between speech and writing in Unit 1, you were looking only at isolated instances of speech and writing data. So while you were able to locate differences between speech and writing, could you really say that the differences you found were representative of speech and writing? It is difficult to say what is representative without having access to a large body of speech and writing texts. Your reference grammar is based on data on how English users actually speak and write. That is, your reference grammar is based on corpora. The authors of your reference grammar had to explore large spoken and written corpora before presenting their findings in the manageable form that makes your reference grammar the very useful tool that it is. When you are reading your reference grammar, you are reading about the results of corpus searches. How much more exciting it would be for you to, in some way, mirror the explorations of the authors of your reference grammar – to do some explorations of corpora yourself. By examining corpora yourself, the grammatical and corpus concepts you have met so far in this course will become much more concrete. As a result of navigating your way through spoken and written corpora, you will find too that the insights you already have of the differences between speech and writing will sink in more deeply. Really getting inside English through doing your own corpus...