Chapter 4 â Research task 2
Chapter 4 – Research task 2 The following activity can be used as a research task, and is designed to complement the content of Chapter 4 in Galloway and Rose’s (2015) book Introducing Global Englishes (Oxon., UK: Routledge).
Analysing corpora Step 1 Much of the research into native varieties of English is based on corpus-based studies. There are many corpuses around the world that aim to investigate language in use and showcase authentic, naturally occurring language. The majority of corpora focus on native English speaker usage, including: o COBUILD: www.mycobuild.com/about-collins-corpus.aspx o The British National Corpus (BNC): www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ o The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/ Other corpora include: o Wordsmith: www.lexically.net/wordsmith/ o Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) o The Bank of English. Step 2 Choose one of these corpora and search for a word (e.g. you may be interested in the difference between American and British vocabulary, or gender/age comparisons, etc.) Step 3 Look at the Wordsmith corpus (website details above). Using this website, do the following: 1. Run a Concord to find all instances of a word or phrase (e.g. to find collocations or the grammar surrounding it). 2. Search for keywords to find salient words in a text (e.g. your interview transcripts from the Chapter 2 research task) and then create word lists to determine their frequency. Step 4 Present your findings in class.
Analysing corpora Step 1 Much of the research into native varieties of English is based on corpus-based studies. There are many corpuses around the world that aim to investigate language in use and showcase authentic, naturally occurring language. The majority of corpora focus on native English speaker usage, including: o COBUILD: www.mycobuild.com/about-collins-corpus.aspx o The British National Corpus (BNC): www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ o The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE): http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/ Other corpora include: o Wordsmith: www.lexically.net/wordsmith/ o Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) o The Bank of English. Step 2 Choose one of these corpora and search for a word (e.g. you may be interested in the difference between American and British vocabulary, or gender/age comparisons, etc.) Step 3 Look at the Wordsmith corpus (website details above). Using this website, do the following: 1. Run a Concord to find all instances of a word or phrase (e.g. to find collocations or the grammar surrounding it). 2. Search for keywords to find salient words in a text (e.g. your interview transcripts from the Chapter 2 research task) and then create word lists to determine their frequency. Step 4 Present your findings in class.
