Preface
Preface

Author(s): Chris Tribble
Subject(s): Foreign languages learning, Language acquisition, Philology
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: Preface; language studies; corpus; language learning; data-driven learning; concordancing;
Summary/Abstract: As I’m not the author of this volume, and as Alex Boulton and James Thomas have already written an excellent, and extensive, introduction, I felt at a bit of a loss when starting out to write this present preface. However, in the best tradition of empirical language studies I decided to seek guidance on how I might go about writing into this genre by consulting a range of permissible exemplars. After some searching, I decided to focus on one of the best known English variants: Wordsworth’s preface to The Lyrical Ballads – a 9,000-word argument for the kinds of poetics the author wished to present to the public. Clearly, as a corpus linguist of a kind, my next step was to see what corpus analysis might offer to help me in my task. With WordSmith Tools ( Scott 2008) to hand, I quickly generated a wordlist for this text, and then a set of keywords (referenced against the British National Corpus). And what did I find apart from the words poem and poetry? At the top of the list came: pleasure, language, reader, and passions. And there was my framework for my preface to Input, Process and Product: Developments in Teaching and Language Corpora.

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