Corpus Booklet 8.19
8/19/04
3:08 PM
Page 8
White, black, red, blue, brown, green, yellow, gray, pink, and orange are the top 10 colors, and so we can prioritize these above the less frequent ones. Touchstone does this in the form of a simple “word sort” activity (Figure 7), and gives learners the chance to associate the color names with personal information so that they will learn them more effectively.
Figure 7: Word sort activity – Touchstone, Level 1, Unit 8B, Cambridge University Press Other important types of information can be extracted from corpora apart from grammar and vocabulary. For example, when people are listening to another person, they react appropriately to what they hear. They do not simply say yes, no, or uh-huh to everything. If we search the Corpus for places where people respond, we see that people use a range of expressions that do more than merely acknowledge that they have understood. Figure 8 shows some examples. A: B: A: A: B: A:
B:
But yeah. I’m really excited about it. Oh that’s great. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. He’s gonna be there for the Fall semester. Oh really? Oh that’s interesting. He said he learned to make very good Indian food, basically just from figuring it out from eating in Indian restaurants. That’s amazing.
Figure 8: Corpus extracts showing some common responses in conversation Using this information, textbook writers can build speaking activities to encourage natural, appropriate responses. Here is an activity from Touchstone: students listen to short anecdotes and practice responding appropriately. 8
Touchstone — From Corpus to Course Book