Autonomy and discovery in language learning: the role of corpora

Abstract Today’s effortless access to countless online materials, courses, communities and tools is changing the way in which we and our students live and communicate on a daily basis. We all think that ‘googling’, messaging or exploring web sites for information is a natural and ordinary activity. It is, in fact, already an essential aspect of our first language competence. Nevertheless, the inclusion of this kind of communication in our teaching is yet nowhere near: syllabi, schools and language centres hardly consider the integration of activities which require autonomous access to online materials and learners tend not to use online FL resources on their own, possibly because of a lack of confidence, guidance and their limited competence in the foreign language. Unfiltered foreign language online resources are, indeed, difficult to deal with and while dictionaries and online dictionaries and reference tools can help unravel the meaning of unfamiliar words, the main obstacles derive from lexical bundles, idiomatic expressions, culture-bound 'hidden' messages, figurative language, humor, slang and other phraseological or socially determined aspects of language use (Granger 2011). Most corpus linguists maintain that this is largely linked to the fact that learners have a limited ability to deal not so much with the meaning of words and grammar rules, but with context and co-text; with how words create regular patterns (Partington 2008), but are extremely slippery and acquire different meanings in different situations. This is particularly relevant where accuracy and appropriateness is at the core of the learning process, like in translation, academic and writing courses. Several approaches to language pedagogy based on (or driven by) corpus linguistics have tried to face this issue in the last decades, but their impact on language learning pedagogy remains very limited, mainly because corpus analysis tools are felt as too sophisticated by the average learner. The paper suggests that access to online unfiltered materials should be introduced in ordinary language syllabi and that learners can be led to gradually build their confidence and autonomy in dealing with larger units of meaning, co-text and context, patterns, humor and other advanced features of language. It describes activities and tasks that require the observation of examples of language used in context, from more familiar online resources like google or from more 'unfriendly' tools like online corpora. References Granger S. (2011), From phraseology to pedagogy: Challenges and prospects. In Herbst T., Schüller S. and Uhrig P. (eds). The Phraseological View of Language. A tribute to John Sinclair, Berlin & New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 123-146. Partington A. (2008), Patterns and Meanings: Using Corpora for English Language Research and Teaching, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, John Benjamins. Zanca C. (2011), Developing translation strategies and cultural awareness using corpora and the web. Paris, Tralogy Session 3 - Training translators / La formation du traducteur [Online Publication], URL: lodel.irevues.inist.fr/tralogy/index.php