Journal of the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages (Jan 2010)
Addressing the Language Description Deficit
Abstract
Well-described language features are key to successful teaching and learning, especially for achieving advanced levels of proficiency. Other measures, such as simply increasing the number of reading and listening passages in a language program alone are not enough to bring the student to a higher level in a given skill. In fact, even being present in the target culture does not suffice. Angelelli and Degueldre (2002) argue that at advanced levels, even spending time in a country where the language is spoken is not necessarily sufficient for learners: "They do not need just exposure; they need answers to questions and explanations that they can rarely get by simply being immersed in a language/ culture." Less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) lack descriptions that have such answers and explanations (cf. Fotos, 2002). It is argued in this paper that corpuslinguistic analyses help to provide actual usage-based, rather than intuition-based, descriptions and explanations of language features. Such approach is illustrated through English and Turkish examples.
