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Corpora have been used in English as a foreign language materials for decades, and native corpora have been present in the classroom by means of direct approaches such as Data-Driven Learning (Johns, T., and P. King 1991. "'Should you be Persuaded'- Two Samples of Data-Driven Learning Materials." In "Classroom Concordancing," 1-16. Birmingham University. English Language Research Journal 4.). However, the suitability of using learners' output in classroom tasks remains controversial. This paper describes a pilot study in the application of a non-standard direct approach where Spanish university students are invited to reflect on their production. In the experiment, carried out in several sessions during the course, the students were exposed to a selection of erroneous sentences from their compositions. Prior to the classroom activity, the teacher contrasted the learners' sentences with correct versions produced by native English speakers. A relevant part of the methodology consisted in getting learners collectively involved in finding the errors and suggesting improvements. After that, solutions were discussed through the analysis of the alternative sentences provided by the native students. The results show that students are willing to accept this methodology as a supplement to textbooks' proposals. We claim that authentic and highly specific learner data obtained from a reliable ad hoc learner corpus and direct exposure to these data through controlled activities may cover certain learners' needs not found in textbooks.

Copyright of Pragmalingüística is the property of Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad de Cadiz and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this paper is to review and analyse relevant factors related to the implementation of corpus linguistics (CL) in higher education. First we set out to describe underlying principles of CL and its developments in relation to theoretical linguistics and its applications in modern teaching practices. Then we attempt to establish how different types of corpora have contributed to the development of direct and indirect approaches in language teaching. We single out Data Driven Learning (DDL) due to its relevance in applied linguistics literature, and examine in detail advantages and drawbacks. Finally, we outline problems concerning the implementation of CL in the classroom since awareness of the limitations of CL is vital for its future success.

Copyright of CIRCULO de Linguistica Aplicada a la Comunicacion is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Hotel websites display textual and non-textual strategies with the aim of turning online visitors into customers. This article focuses on two related textual aspects: how consumers are discursively construed and how conditional constructions are used in order to persuade and convince consumers of the adequacy of the hotel. The framework adopted for the analysis combines Stern’s notion of ‘implied consumer’ with a corpus-driven approach. The corpus data comprises 114 British hotel websites and totals half a million words. This is a subcorpus of COMETVAL, a database compiled at the University of València. The results reveal the importance of a number of words that address consumers directly or indirectly. These words intertwine with others to form patterns that help establish a bond between hoteliers and their clients. Further exploration of the corpus confirmed that some conditional sequences such as if you and should you are used by advertisers to speculate about the needs and wishes of consumers that the hotel can fulfil for them. The analysis suggests that conditional structures are a distinctive discursive characteristic strongly associated with the dialogic nature of the discourse hotel websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centres on four-word phrase frames in British hospitality websites. Our aim is to identify those frames that are specific to this website genre, which we call target frames. Each phrase frame represents an identical sequence of words except for one variable word, that is A*BC or AB*D. The words that fill the slot, marked with an asterisk, are called fillers. We used a corpus-driven approach using KfNgram software to identify the phrase frames in our corpus (COMETVAL). We regard phrase frames as genre-specific when they are significantly more frequent than those found in the written section of the BNC, which represents General British English. We further filtered our selection of phrase frames by eliminating those which were not semantically homogenous with regard to the variable words they contained. Only in this way could the 76 phrase frames we identified be classified according to their primary discourse function. We contend that our study is a valuable addition to the literature on phraseology and can be of use in pedagogical and professional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Television commercials are often thought of as bothersome multimedia artefacts that by their very existence spoil our viewing pleasure at regular intervals. Not only that, but they seem to have the habit of ordering us around. This aspect of TV ads has often been commented on by experts and laypersons alike. Therefore, we decided to tackle this issue and look at the prototypical expression of directives, that is, imperatives in voice-overs in television commercials. To this end we have carried out an empirical analysis of imperatives in voice-overs in the MATVA corpus (Multimodal Analysis of TV Ads) which contains transcriptions of nearly 800 voice-overs in British TV ads recorded on six days during 2009, 2010 and 2011. We provide an exhaustive quantitative and qualitative profile of imperatives in contemporary TV advertising. This includes information on the distribution of imperatives, the most common verbs in imperative clauses, and their discourse function. We are also able to show conclusively that the directive force of imperatives in TV ads is more akin to advice or recommendation than commands, and explain from a discourse-pragmatic perspective why this is so. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The term ‘authenticity’ has been variously interpreted by second language acquisition and ESL scholars. It has been taken to refer to the materials used in class, such as texts, but also to the type of tasks the students are assigned, or even to the type of classroom interaction. Our contribution is concerned with the first of these interpretations. We focus on the authenticity of what are purported to be ‘real’ texts included in textbooks for advanced students of English at B2 and C1 levels, according to the Common European Framework of Reference. This empirical study is based on a series of parameters that have been established in order to examine the extent to which the authenticity of real texts has been preserved and to establish other related changes that such texts are subjected to when included in textbooks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Caxton's biographers have considered the prologue to The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye very valuable in interpreting various events of Caxton's life which would otherwise remain obscure due to the scarcity of documents. The author of this article proposes a more careful approach in reading the statements in The Recuyell, and caution in accepting at face value much of the information contained there. The interpretation given here of several events in the prologue and epilogues of the first English printer, as for instance his birthplace, the dialect of his writings, etc., reveals that Caxton is frequently presenting himself according to the medieval tradition of the humility formula. This formula requires that authors refer to themselves disparagingly. Both prologue and epilogues may contain some truth, but certainly they may not be regarded as examples of unambiguous historical evidence.

Hotel websites have been researched from the perspective of vocabulary and discourse. However, little attention has been paid to lexical bundles and phrase frames in these text types. In this paper, I show by means of an empirical analysis that such word sequences characterise these sites as a highly specialised domain. With this aim in mind, I have analysed a corpus of British hotel websites containing 242,000 words from a database, currently being compiled by the research group COMETVAL. I show that bundles and frames follow very similar principles but differ in flexibility. Moreover, the existence of frames shows collaboration between the idiom and open-choice principle. In fact, most bundles in my corpus are instances of phrase frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]