Corpora, phraseology and dictionaries : How does corpus research intersect language teaching and learning?

Abstract

This article discusses the role of corpus data in language learning and teaching as well as the benefits of using authentic language data in learner dictionary writing. It has been argued that acquiring and teaching a target language and its phraseology would benefit from the usage of naturally occurring language. In the research on learner language phraseology to date, there is a bias towards analyses of collocations and ngrams. The present article attempts, however, to widen this scope to other dimensions of phraseology, namely semantic preference and semantic prosody, which are more abstract and perhaps more difficult to learn than concrete co-occurring lexical items. This article introduces a case study of the Finnish degree modifier oikein (‘very’), which often occurs in deviant phraseological patterns in learner writing. The data come from the International Corpus of Learner Finnish and the Corpus of Translated Finnish. The article suggests how Finnish learner dictionaries could represent words as phraseological items.