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The Real Thing: using corpora to write language training materials by Bill Mascull

Cambridge University Press authors are lucky in having access to the Cambridge International Corpus (CIC), a collection of over a billion words of spoken and written English. The texts are stored in a database and searchable in various ways to show how language is actually used. So, in writing business English materials, I can mine the rich seams of hundreds of thousands of pages of business news from newspapers, and many hours of business meetings and lectures by business professors — I'll refer to this input from here on as 'the data'.

Typical features

One big feature of business English is compounds, the way that words typically go together to form two-, three- or even four-word combinations. These combinations are essential for learners to know, and one of the language features that Business Vocabulary in Use looks at and gives practice in. This is the language area that I'll concentrate on here, but of course there are many others that language corpora can be used to elucidate.

Tough and tougher still

Take the word competition. The CIC lets me build, in a few seconds, a collocation table of 337 words that come in front of competition in the data. This would be pretty indigestible for even the keenest learner, but one of the roles of the ELT writer is to simplify and select, and in the context of corpora, this means selecting the most frequent and interesting features of the language, therefore the items I included in a unit about competition in Business Vocabulary in Use Advanced were:

cut-throat	ferocious	fierce	intense
keen	low-key	stiff	tough

Some of the words in the collocations table that I didn't include in the book were strong, direct, intensified and tougher — it's interesting how the most frequent words in front of competition relate to its intensity.

Competing and Competitive

Students often ask teachers what the difference is between two similar words. Of course, as native or near-native speakers of English, teachers have advanced levels of intuition about typical English usage. But the danger in the classroom (I've done it myself!) is to give instant, off-the-top-of-one's-head-type answers, theorising vaguely 'on the hoof' about the profound 'nature' of the two words. The corpus can be used to provide concrete examples of language use to confirm that intuition (or otherwise!) Take, for example, competing and competitive. Collocation tables show among the words that occur most frequently after competing are products, bids, offerings, suppliers and technologies.

After competitive, we have, among others, product, position and pressure. From this information, I constructed the following input presentation.

Competing and competitive are adjectives related to competition. Two companies may produce competing products - products that compete with each other. A competitive product is one that has real and specific benefits in relation to others of the same type.

'Competing' also occurs in these combinations.

two or more…

	bids	price offers for a company in a takeover
competing	offerings	products from different companies
	suppliers	companies offering similar products or services
	technologies	technical ways of doing something

'Competitive' also occurs in these combinations.

	position	where a company is in relation to its competitors in terms of size, growth, etc
	pressure	the force that one competitor can bring to bear in relation to another
competitive	prices	ones that are similar to or lower than those for similar products
	threat	something that one competitor may do to weaken another's position
	advantage/edge	superior products, performance etc that a competitor can offer in relation to others
	strategy	a plan or plans for success in relation to competitors, and the study of this in business schools

From presentation to practice: mind the gap

A related example to the 'theorising on the hoof' I mentioned above is the one of making up sentences to illustrate the meaning of a word or expressions. This is as much a problem for materials writers as for teachers. It's strange how wooden made-up examples can sound, even ones made up by sophisticated language users such as ourselves — teachers and materials writers, the pedagogical professionals!

Even if materials writers don't use actual examples from the corpora, the data provide a basis on which to work — the data can 'inspire' examples that I would not have been able to make up by myself. Below are the exercises related to the above presentation. In these cases, I used examples from the data pretty much without change:

17.2 Look at section B. Match the two parts of these extracts containing expressions with competing.

1. What is to stop supposedly competing	a) bids from mining giants Inco Ltd and Falconbridge Ltd.
2. Commtouch can position itself in the middle of the competing	b) suppliers from secretly agreeing to keep prices high?
3. Diamond Fields Resources Inc was the target of competing	c) offerings, with prices ranging from $300 to $450.
4. The software is 25 per cent cheaper than competing	d) technologies by offering 'unified messaging solutions'.

I've always liked the type of matching exercise above. It encourages learners to think fully about the meaning of the sentences involved as much as any gap exercise.

17.3 Look at section B again. Complete the sentences with appropriate forms of words that can follow competitive.

He was criticised for being too Eurocentric and failing to pay sufficient attention to the competitive ________ from south-east Asia.
The trick is to find businesses that can sustain their performances over the long term and have some competitive ________ to keep them ahead of the competition. (2 possibilities)
For the price-conscious consumer, alternative retail outlets can offer organic food at more competitive ______ .
First Chicago will enhance its competitive ________ and boost its financial growth through the transaction, which is expected to immediately add to earnings.
Mall stores are under the most competitive ________ that they've been under in their 40-year history, with new discounters and superstores increasingly moving in alongside traditional malls.
Decades of management theorising around the world have produced mountains of books, many of which promise to deliver the secrets of success. But there is no consensus on competitive ________ .

Here again, learners are forced to think about the meaning of the sentences: gap completion takes place in a powerful communicative context. It might have been possible to 'make up' sentences for completion, but they probably wouldn't have been as good as these authentic ones.

The power of real language: pre-sifted and unsifted

I've illustrated this article with examples of input and practice from Business Vocabulary in Use Advanced, but there are some general points to be drawn. There is now an amazing array of labour-saving devices at the disposal of the language teachers and learners who want to use real language as input. Dictionaries, grammars and usage books are all now informed by corpus data.

Some are designed specifically for learners, others more for advanced learners and teachers (like advanced dictionaries), but they all provide access to some of the insights into real language use that have emerged in the last 25 years or so, thanks in large part to the fact that their writers/compilers have had access to language corpora and the tools to analyze them. You could say that these pedagogical devices 'pre-sift' and process the language into pedagogically convenient chunks.

Let's go back to the issue above of learners asking about the differences between two words. Teachers can note down students' questions and come back to them in the next class, having done some research, not only in corpora-informed dictionaries or grammars, but also in the world of real-language use provided by the internet, where real, 'unsifted' language is also available in ways that make it more approachable and analyzable from a pedagogical point of view than ever before. Search engines such as Google allow interesting exploration of language use.

A quick search on Google for 'competitive' brought up the following list at the foot of the first page of results:

competitive analysis	competitive advantage	competitive quotes
competitive enterprises	competitive benchmarking

In this way, teachers can find some interesting examples of language use, ones that would help them in their explanations to students. And the examples that teachers look for could be directly related to participants' work or studies.

But there's no reason why the teacher should monopolize this type of activity. An interesting task for intermediate and advanced learners would be for them to go to see what some of these linked sites are about. You could ask them to do this and report back in the next lesson.

Of course, language databases such as the Cambridge International Corpus provide more sophisticated tools for linguistic analysis of language data, but it's interesting how the world's websites now constitute a mega-corpus for learners to look at and learn from. There's no shortage of data out there waiting to be analyzed!

Bill Mascull is the author of Business Vocabulary in Use.