Corpus Linguistics, the World Wide Web, and English Language Teaching

Abstract

This article explores how the Web can serve as a resource for teaching modality in English to prospective teachers of ESL, EFL and ESP. The first section demonstrates how texts taken from two different registers on the Web can be used to teach epistemic modality (e.g. how modal verbs such as may and could express notions of probability and certainty). The second section explores how the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) can be searched to study deontic modality, specifically how the expressions should and might want to are used by teachers and advisors to give advice to students. The discussion demonstrates that teaching grammar is most effective when it is based on real data rather than contrived and decontextualized examples in grammar books.

Keywords

• corpus linguistics
• the World Wide Web
• data-driven learning
• modality