Using a Corpus in a 300-level Spanish grammar course

Abstract: The present study examined the use and effectiveness of a large corpus- the Corpus del Espan~ ol (Davies, 2002)-in a 300-level Spanish grammar university course. Students conducted hands-on corpus searches with the goal of finding concordances containing particular types of collocations (combinations of words that tend to co-occur) and tokens (any occurrence of a word or sequence of words), then used these examples from authentic texts in order to better understand and use the grammatical concepts under consideration (e.g., preterite vs. imperfect, ser and estar). The study was designed to better inform language educators' understanding of the extent to which access to, and active use of, a large corpus helped students better understand and use particular grammatical concepts and structures. Qualitative and quantitative data obtained from a student survey offer evidence that the corpus was an effective learning tool and represented an innovative use of technology.Key words: Spanish, concordances, corpora, corpus searches, grammatical rulesIntroductionA corpus is a searchable collection of naturally occurring, authentic texts that are stored electronically and usually made accessible online (see Reppen, 2010). Corpora were first created for the purpose of studying linguistic phenomena (McEnery & Hardie, 2013); large corpora - that is, corpora consisting of millions of words - provide a particularly important reference and learning tool because they offer examples of actual language use across a wide range and number of authentic texts that cannot, in most cases, be obtained otherwise (see Liu & Jiang, 2009). Specifically, neither grammar books, dictionaries (see Tsui, 2004), textbooks, research articles, or even corpus-based grammars (see Bernardini, 2004) provide sufficient breadth and depth of authentic texts, excerpts of sufficient length, or even sufficient sample sentences, to provide the required array of examples that learners need to develop a more nuanced sense of the range of correct, real-world ways in which grammar can be used to convey meaning. Since even in upper-level courses students, including relatively proficient heritage and even native speakers, may be unsure about the fine differences in meaning that are conveyed by differing linguistic choices, corpus searches allow students to use authentic linguistic evidence to verify for themselves the accuracy of the grammar explanations and examples that are provided in a textbook, formulate grammatical rules and exceptions to those rules, find alternate or divergent uses of a range of grammatical structures, and make reasoned choices to perfect their understanding of the relationship between form and meaning.The present study examined the use and effectiveness of a large corpus-the Corpus del Espa~nol (Davies, 2002) by students in a 300-level, one-semester grammar course in Spanish. The study was designed to inform language educators' understanding of the extent to which access to, and active use of, a large corpus helped students refine their knowledge and use of particular grammatical concepts and structures (e.g., preterite vs. imperfect, ser and estar), as well as render more correct and nuanced both their speech and their writing.Review of LiteratureThere is a growing body of literature on the use of corpora for language teaching, although most of the studies have addressed the use of corpora in English as a second or foreign language (ESL or EFL) classes.1 A number of studies have examined the use of corpora to explore tokens (any occurrence in a corpus of a word or sequence of words) as well as collocations, commonly occurring groups of words, to determine their use and positioning across a range of authentic texts. For example, Liu and Jiang (2009) examined the effects of incorporating corpus and contextualized lexicogrammar2 (e.g., how the words disinterested and uninterested differ in their structural usage patterns) in the teaching of EFL and ESL in one Chinese university and two U. …