Abstract:

In this paper, we will report on a pedagogical experiment conducted at the University of South-Brittany in Lorient (France). This project had a dual purpose. On the one hand, we wanted to present to our foreign students some aspects of the French and also Breton cultures. The latter, of Celtic origin, although still very prevalent in this part of France, remains mostly unknown to our students. On the other hand, we also meant to introduce our learners to Corpus Linguistics and to the text searching tools this particular field uses, in the hope that this new knowledge might become useful to them in their own area of interest. We thought that combining two objectives in one single project would make the experiment doubly rewarding for our students.

This in-class project was conducted using the French sub-component of the IntUne corpus which contains nearly 30 million words from a variety of French newspapers and notably articles from “Ouest-France”, a regional daily from Brittany. These texts were searched using the Xaira software developed at the University of Oxford.

After a brief presentation of our theoretical framework, we will detail our experiment, and report on the students’ views. We came out of this project further convinced of the benefits Corpus Linguistics can bring to introducing culture(s) in the foreign language classroom but also to teaching in general and we stand by Sinclair (2004) who thought that “corpora are now part of the resources that more and more teachers expect to have access to.”

References:
Sinclair, J. (2004). How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Keywords:

Culture, corpora, Corpus Linguistics, teaching, text searching.