RETRIEVING PATTERNS FROM A CORPUS FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING : ONE STEP CLOSER TO BE AUTONOMOUS LEARNERS

Abstract

These days, teachers are not the only resource where the students can rely on. Existing websites and software are available; hence, it can support the students to be autonomous learners. In the field of corpus linguistics, some corpora are specialized for language learning. Even for general corpora, in the hand of corpus processing software user, they can be a great potential for learning resources. This paper aims at demonstrating how a corpus processing engine and can perform some Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks that are beneficial for language learning. As for this paper, the corpus and its processing are all performed on-line: the corpus that I use is COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English. COCA is composed of text from diverse ranges of genres both spoken and written. Students of English department are required to consult this corpus, instead of dictionary, by applying patterns that they find difficult to understand (on the basis of academic writing exercise result).There are some structures that are frequently used by the students and they are encouraged to: 1) test whether the structure patterns are grammatically correct, or ill formed, 2) identify the contexts where the patterns are used, and 3) determine the proper use of the structure by textual evidence. The research procedure is as follows: students are required to input syntax queries to COCA. As it is well understood for COCA users, this corpus processing engine uses regular expression as input queries. These inputs must comply with COCA’s syntax. Three queries are selected to apply, and they are related to the following lemmas <V:suggest>, <V:help> and <N:goal>. Form the concordance display, students can: 1) identify the left and right context, 2) recognize recurrent patterns, 3) associate the context to the text genre, 4) compare with Indonesian corpus, and 5) derive conclusion. In turn, the purpose of this investigation is to prepare them to be both autonomous students and researchers as well.