Faculty of Arts and Letters mentor John Paul Q. Herrera, who teaches at the Department of English, delivered a lecture on “Using Corpus in ELT: The whats and the hows”on October 23, 2020, via Zoom as part of the faculty development program of the Department of English.
Herrera explained corpus as a collection of machine-readable authentic texts, including spoken data, which may be used to represent a language or language variety. For English language teachers, the study of corpora, the plural form of corpus, is important because it offers a great wealth of resources that teachers can use in teaching.
Furthermore, Herrera, who obtained his Master’s degree in English Language Education from the De La Salle University, discussed corpus linguistics, which is the methodology for studying language use. Citing the reasons for using corpus in the classroom, such as finding out how native speakers speak, among others, helps the language teacher discover an open-ended range of possibilities of “discovery learning,” he explained.
Likewise, Herrera showed how corpus can be used in the classroom as well as in research, such as the frequent words and phrases in English, the differences between written and spoken English, and some new words which emerged over the months, such as the Coronavirus corpus. He also expounded on some actual corpus queries which can be adapted in classrooms, and cited studies such as multi-word verbs in World Englishes, disjuncts in World Englishes, and his own research paper on conjuncts in Philippine English.
Herrera gave some resources on corpus linguistics and English language teaching that includes TV corpus, Philippine English words, and dying words, among others.
Asst. Prof. Marlene L. Navera was the Master of Ceremonies and Open Forum moderator.
