LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 11 : 9 September 2011
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.

HOME PAGE

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIAL

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Contributors from South Asia may e-mail their articles to
    B. Mallikarjun,
    Central Institute of Indian Languages,
    Manasagangotri,
    Mysore 570006, India     mallikarjun@ciil.stpmy.soft.net.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2010
M. S. Thirumalai
Custom Search

Corpora: The Future of ELT in Pakistan

Rashid Mahmood, M.Phil.
Asim Mahmood, M.Phil.

Abstract

The advent of corpus linguistics has brought new dimensions in linguistic and language teaching theories. Traditional view of the internal structure of human language claimed that grammar provides empty skeletons of utterances, later filled with appropriate lexis in the course of discourse formation.

The new schematic approach introduces the notion of lexicogrammar and combines the previously separate fields of grammar and vocabulary. It sees utterance production “as exploiting ready-made memorized building blocks or ‘pre-fabs’, put together using simpler ‘jerrybuilding’ operations” (Aston 1995). It implies that the process of learning can be seen as approximating the observed patterns to form the schemata.

Corpus based research has an edge over intuition based research as it provides evidence from a large scale authentic data. In Pakistan, corpus based research can provide solutions to the problems like status of Pakistani English, confusing criteria for students’ errors, subjective judgments on differences from standard English, and material development on sound basis etc.

Very few researchers embarked on studying Pakistani English and none ventured studying it on the basis of corpus. In the absence of any research which may categorically establish standards of English in Pakistan, there are no parameters to differentiate errors from deviations.

The corpus based research can open new vistas in ELT. It facilitates testing the hypotheses based on intuition. It can help establish Pakistani English a new variety. The results of such a research would revolutionize the practice of ELT. Language Policy would undergo a substantive change. This indigenized variety (just like British English, American English, Australian English, Indian English etc) will help syllabus designers, text book and grammar writers and lexicographers focus their attention on the areas where learners need more practice. Both spoken and written corpora are useful for researchers, teachers and students alike. Teachers can compile their own corpora based on the textbooks they are teaching. They can make frequency indexes of the vocabulary and can prepare concordances to disambiguate words’ senses and to show the patterns of use.

1 Introduction

A corpus is defined as “a collection of naturally occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language” (Sinclair, 1991). Corpora help us empirically analyse the actual patterns of use. Varieties of computer software are available to extract certain linguistic information from the corpus. The corpus studies allow both quantitative techniques and qualitative interpretation.

Corpus linguistics is not a branch or discipline of linguistics, rather a methodology or a tool. According to Meyer (2002), “corpus linguistics is more a way of doing linguistics than a separate paradigm within linguistics”. Corpus resources have grown a lot in the past ten years. British National Corpus (BNC), American National Corpus (ANC) and International Corpus of English (ICE) are huge repositories of English corpora. S.V. Shastri and his colleagues compiled first Indian English corpus, Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English, in 1998. It contains one million words of Indian English. The authors of this paper have compiled a corpus of three million words of written Pakistani English. Very soon the corpus will be available for pedagogical purposes.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Rashid Mahmood, M.Phil.
Assistant Professor
Government College University
Faisalabad
Pakistan
ch.raashidmahmood@gmail.com

Asim Mahmood, M.Phil.
Assistant Professor
Government College University
Faisalabad
Pakistan
masimrai@gmail.com
Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you either cited or used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian scholarship.