    
Teachers and language confidence
Even native speakers have doubts
sometimes about the correctness or appropriateness of some aspects of language
that students create. So for non-native speakers, having something online that
is more useful than dictionaries and grammar books (and native speakers!) is a godsend.
Enter the corpus.
Using a corpus
A corpus is useful not only for correcting written work, but for writing exercises
and tests, preparing vocabulary teaching, raising language awareness,
developing student independence, etc. Some comments from students who regularly
use these tools at the FI MU can be read
here. For correcting written work, a teacher can enter a word or phrase into a concordancer and see if
something similar exists in the millions of words that typically form a
corpus.
There are various online concordancers.
At Masaryk University we use the Sketch Engine (WSE), which is not free to
others, but it is not expensive either. My
corpus portal
contains information and links to the WSE and a range of other possibilities.
For the WSE, there is a downloadable introduction for teachers available
here and online sample searches
here. To
learn the basics of using a corpus via the Cobuild tool, see my
Introduction to Concordancing
website.
From time to time training in the use of
these tools is offered - see
here.
Many of the problems students have are well-known and frequent. This is a
feature of
interlanguage:
no matter how often students are corrected in some aspects of language, they
will not get it right until they are cognitively ready. Nevertheless, there are
websites that provide information about Common Errors.
You can find more such sites by searching in
Google. For example, enter "Common Errors" student writing.
Even though many of them are for native speakers, the information is usually
useful.
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