ELT teacher and teacher trainer, and Cambridge Secondary Product Marketing Manager, Will asks: when creating course book and course materials, just how much of the vocab, functional language and grammar is informed by current language use? And how is it done? In this article, we explore what is done to inform course books of the current language trends to enable learners to communicate successfully.
The Corpus: billions of data points to draw from
As a course book is being developed, the authors need to make sure that the language they have written into the course is both relevant and accessible to the learner. To do this, they call upon the team researching current language trends to ensure that the specific language points being taught are natural, authentic and up-to-date. This is done using a corpus.
A corpus is a very large collection of language that is used to find out how language is really used. The Cambridge English Corpus is a multi-billion word collection of real-life English. It has been put together over the last 25 years from a range of sources like books, magazines, lectures, text messages, everyday conversations, emails, etc. This means that our students are being exposed to language from the real-world, and, with a pinch of hard work, they will be equipped with the language they need to interact successfully with the global community.
How the Corpus shapes our course books
We often hear that what students are taught in class isn’t always what they hear in ‘real life’, or that it’s different to what they hear when they watch films or TV in English, for example. The aim is to make sure students are well-equipped to cope with this – both in terms of learning real-life language itself, and also by developing strategies to deal with any unfamiliar language. In order to show you exactly how this is done, here are a few examples taken directly from our course books…
| Original language point | Revised language point via the corpus | Reason for revision | |
| Think (2016) | ‘The TV broke down’ | ‘The car broke down’ | Common collocates of the phrasal verb ‘break down’ are typically grouped by communication, marriage/relationships, and vehicles |
| Talent (2018) | ‘It isn’t’ | ‘It’s not’ | Cambridge has done some research on informal language and found out that, in spoken English, we now often say e.g. ‘it’s not’ instead of ‘it isn’t’ |
| Own it! / Shape it! (2020) | ‘Can you help me, please?’ and ‘Would you mind…?’ | ‘I was wondering if…’and ‘…, would that be ok?’. | Functional language data shows that typically we say things like ‘I was wondering if…’ instead of ‘Would you mind…?’ when asking for help. |
If you missed the webinar by Olivia Goodman from our language research team on using corpora to inform ELT materials, you can catch up on it below. In the webinar, Olivia focuses specifically on language change and how we can ensure learners are being taught the most relevant and up-to-date language so that they are well-equipped to communicate in English.
Watch out for Will’s next article, where he shares 3 skills and strategies you can teach your students to help them deal with ever-evolving language trends. Read other materials and resources for teaching teens in our Secondary articles.