4 Self-access use

4.1 Reference

While the discussion in the last section may sound like a language learner's nightmare, this was not in fact the case. From the very start, we encouraged learners to use the BNC to solve language problems which emerged in the course of their other work in the school, on a self-access basis. Within a couple of weeks, after only 3 hours of seminar sessions, all reported having used it as a reference tool in writing and in translating, and some as a source of information concerning uses they had encountered in reading or listening. Most were enthusiastic about their experience, enthusiasm which was to become universal by the end of the seminar.

The information they were deriving from the corpus was not, of course, particularly adequate in descriptive terms. But for many of their purposes, this mattered relatively little: often it was enough for them to get an approximate idea of what an expression meant, or to see that a particular use or collocation occurred relatively frequently. The corpus was providing them with partial information, and provided they were careful not to overgeneralise, that information was often more useful than that available from other reference tools. The number and range of examples available were giving them a practical idea of some of the ways particular items were used, and facilitating memorisation. One particularly clear instance concerned the verb `predecease'. While dictionaries define this as a legal term meaning `die before', the corpus examples highlighted the fact that wives predecease husbands, children their parents, and that the verb is repeatedly used in the active simple past, visualising a prototypical context of use in these respects. This schema could readily and reasonably confidently be applied to assess particularly instances as relatively routine, or else as relatively unusual, and hence potentially idiosyncractic --- the latter being a vital aspect of understanding for these trainee translators. A corollary was that unusual instances could prove particularly memorable. One learner reported looking up the unknown adjective `lumpy' (which has a zero z-score in the corpus) and coming across `the mattress was as lumpy as a bag of onions' --- hardly a typical exemplar, and for that reason probably not one which would be cited by most corpus- based dictionaries, but a creative simile which she found unforgettable.

4.2 Incidental learning

One of the potentials of corpus use for language learning would appear to be that of browsing, where curiosity leads to the investigation of particular solutions and texts, in turn leading to the formulation of new queries (Aston 1995, 1996). Such serendipitous use of the BNC is a slow business, but its size and variety appeared to be more stimulating for these advanced learners than smaller, more specialised collections of texts. One major source of incidental learning was the discovery of homographs and polysemies in solutions, as when a learner who was trying to understand the use of the form `viz' discovered it could also refer to a magazine, and went on to find out about some of that magazine's contents. The word index often prompted curiosity about near-homographs; one student who looked up `latter' was amazed to discover there were also six occurrences of the form `latters', which she had assumed to be ungrammatical. She downloaded these solutions, discovering that all six involved the possessive form `the latters'', used with plural antecedents, and then went on to find that there were no occurrences of `the formers'' --- though there were, of course, plenty of `first formers' and `sixth formers'.

As well as curiosity about individual expressions, there was curiosity about the source texts themselves. The question "What on earth is this text?" often entailed adventuring into very different text-types from those conventionally drawn on in ELT. Thus when looking up `the proof of the pudding', the example

There's an old English saying --- `the proof of the pudding is in the food
fight afterwards". Two weeks ago the Frank/Rollo version --- an epic trio
of mixes capped by the aptly-named `Big F- Off Mix" was Vibes SOTW.