Description
Book SynopsisMost courses do not include the use of a corpus,
but, paradoxically, many students use them to improve and correct their written texts because accessing one is as easy as doing a Google search. But what can teachers use them for? For years, in class we have taught what we thought most common based on introspection, but the truth is that sometimes the forms we think of as the most prototypical are not the most common in the language. Imagine I want to express an opinion. One of the first options that springs to mind is "It is my opinion that ..."; and yet a much more common way of doing it is to start a sentence with "Well ... I think ...". The only way to know which structures are most used (and therefore the ones we will want to teach in class) is to have samples of real speech. And that is what the corpus contains: samples that help us teach the real language and not a language created in an office in which the grammar is perfect and sentences are never interrupted.
