From language acquisition research to language teaching through the prism of corpora

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL]

In this presentation, I will show how corpora can help bring the fields of (second) language acquisition research and (foreign) language teaching closer together. It will be argued that corpora can contribute to this rapprochement in at least two ways. First, they give access to large quantities of authentic usage data representative of a population in order to test concepts from language acquisition research (see, e.g., Tracy-Ventura & Paquot 2020). Second, they provide a useful basis for the design of teaching materials that can be adapted to learners’ needs and expose them to naturalistic language (cf. Boulton 2017). Illustrations will be given of research paths starting from a language acquisition concept and ultimately leading to teaching applications, all the while taking advantage of the benefits of corpora and corpus techniques. For example, Goldberg’s (2006) “input-driven inductive learning” states that learners acquire a language by generalizing from the specific language instances that they get exposed to. Some aspects of this claim can be tested thanks to learner corpora, e.g. by investigating whether learners with more exposure to language have formed more/better patterns (see Gilquin 2016 for an example). The findings emerging from this analysis can then be used as a basis to develop corpus-based teaching materials that aim to enhance learners’ exposure to the target language and help them develop patterns. This can take the form of data-driven learning exercises which present learners with corpus instances of a pattern and guide them through the discovery of the underlying pattern (see Gilquin 2021 for an example). In this overview, different types of corpora will be considered, including native and learner corpora as well as monolingual and multilingual corpora. Recommendations will also be made that could facilitate the corpus-based rapprochement between language acquisition research and language teaching.