La influencia que los medios de comunicación ejercen sobre nuestros hábitos, creencias y opiniones es, desgraciadamente, enorme. Aceptar que lo que se nos muestra ES la realidad supone menoscabar nuestra propia capacidad crítica y regalar a estos medios, y a sus intereses económicos y agendas, la forma en la que como individuos aceptamos y entendemos nuestra vida y en el entorno en el que se desarrolla.
Uno intuye el nivel de degradación ética que esconden estos medios y que intentan enterrar con políticas de supuesta responsabilidad social etc.
El artículo de Carla Wright demuestra claramente cómo los medios no informan sobre la realidad, sino que la construyen. Y lo hacen subiéndose en las espaldas de los que más sufren y menos capacidad tienen para cuestionar las prácticas de estos medios.
Es difícil mantener la integridad en un entorno corrupto donde el silencio sanciona la hez en la que chapotean medios de comunicación, tradicionales y nuevos.
Q: How much should a discourse analyst know before he or she engages in corpus work?
A: I don’t agree with the presupposition. No discourse analyst needs to know anything doing Corpus Linguistics. What they need (for either) is an open mind, a willingness to learn, to take risks, to make mistakes, to ask for help or find it for themselves. There is not just one way of slicing bread, and the CL ways of slicing it are not necessarily superior to non-CL ways.
Mike Scott, Viana, Zyngier & Barnbrook (2011: 218)
Those who during the last decade tried to barricade the profession against the influence of corpora recycled the critical arguments of the theoreticians thirty years before, and we heard again that no corpus can be a totally accurate sample of a language, that occurrence in a corpus is no guarantee of correctness, that frequency is not a sound guide to importance, that there are inexplicable gaps in the coverage of any corpus, however large, etc.
That flurry of resistance is now largely behind us, and it is timely to consider the issue posed as the title of this book, how to use corpora in language teaching, since corpora are now part of the resources that more and more teachers expect to have access to.
Sinclair (2004: 2)
Sinclair, J. (2004). How to use corpora in language teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Empirical studies that adopt usage-based perspectives document how, in child learners (Ambridge & Lieven, 2015) as well as in adult learners (Cadierno & Eskildsen, 2015), grammar emerges piece-meal from general psychological principles of statistical learning, abstraction, and categorization that are massively, redundantly, and compulsorily engaged during iterative social communication events. Moreover, the events, the statistics, and the categorization are specific to each person’s history of language experience (Ochs, 2012), driven by socially distributed meaning and grounded in the material world, that is, multimodal and embodied (Kiefer & Pullvermüller, 2012). In this talk, I examine a broad palette of applications that have infused these usage-based insights into language teaching. Some see effective language teaching as capitalizing on fundamentally implicit, statistical and input driven processes (Verspoor, 2017). Some agree but also envision a larger role for explicit instruction of grammar as providing top-down short-cuts that strengthen cognitive processes of abstraction and categorization, particularly if the explicit content is informed by cognitive linguistic descriptions and appeals to meaning (Tyler, 2012; Tyler & Ortega, 2018). A role for largely explicit pedagogies is envisioned by others (Zhang & Lantolf, 2015), hoping for instructional designs that can create “artificial” routes of explicit self-regulation into language development. Others (Wagner, 2015) have also called for instruction that orchestrates opportunities for contextualized social interactions “in the wild” with explicit reflections of one’s emergent usage history in the classroom. Yet, others have emphasized the need to put the complexities of learner-and-language at the center of instruction (Larsen-Freeman, 2015; Roehr-Brackin, 2014). In reviewing and evaluating these trends, I will distill theoretical principles that might open up a new kind of usage-inspired language pedagogy for the future, one that will challenge, update, and invigorate language education in the foreseeable future.
Lourdes Ortega is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is best known for an award-winning meta-analysis of second language instruction published in 2000, a best-seller graduate-level textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Routledge 2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016), and since 2010 for championing a bilingual and social justice turn in her field of second language acquisition. Her latest book is The Handbook of Bilingualism with Cambridge University Press (co-edited in 2019 with child bilingualism researcher Annick De Houwer).
