Text, Dictionary and Corpus: Teaching students about the lexico-phraseology of modern English

In this presentation I suggest that text analysis, integrated with corpus-based dictionary description, is an excellent way to teach learners about lexico-phraseology. The principle holds for many formal learning situations; the description in this paper relates specifically to a 30-hour module on 'lexico-phraseology' taught to second-year undergraduates at a Foreign Language Faculty in Italy. The main objectives of the module were: (i) to describe many of the different types of lexico-phraseological phenomena in modern English, (ii) to demonstrate how prevalent lexico-phraseology is, (iii) to show how much lexico-phraseological information is present in corpus-informed dictionaries. The course revolved around the analysis of a single (complete) text, a short story by a modern British writer. The language of the text is mainly a mixture of narration and the fictional representation of speech. Prior to the course, and as part of on-going research, the teacher carried out a ‘manual’ analysis of the entire text. This involved the use of intuition, corpus-informed dictionaries, and corpus interrogation. Lessons consisted of an alternation between the presentation of phraseological phenomena, and the analysis of specific passages from the story. During analysis, PowerPoint was used with colour-coding and typographical techniques to overcome the entrenched readers' vision of a chain of words. An end-of-course exam required students to analyze a passage from the story with the aid of corpus-based dictionaries