Article published In: Register in L1 and L2 Language Development
Edited by Bethany Gray and Jesse Egbert
[Register Studies 3:2] 2021
► pp. 279–298
Exploring register with The Prime Machine
Promoting register awareness through a module for English majors at a Sino-British university in China
Published online: 14 October 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.20015.jea
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.20015.jea
Abstract
Corpus approaches underpin a range of postgraduate studies and professional work in language, linguistics, translation and beyond. Awareness of the influences of contextual features on language choice is important for many activities: exploring new text varieties; finding relationships between social factors and language patterning; considering choices for post-editing machine translation; and understanding the very nature of language. Work on register relies on corpus methods, but more support and direction could be offered to help undergraduates gain earlier insights into the power of such corpus analysis. This paper introduces some ways register differences can be revealed through The Prime Machine corpus tool (Jeaco, S. (2017a). Concordancing Lexical Primings: The rationale and design of a user-friendly corpus tool for English language teaching and self-tutoring based on the Lexical Priming theory of language. In M. Pace-Sigge & K. J. Patterson (Eds.), Lexical Priming: Applications and Advances (pp. 273–296). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ) and describes the design of a practically-oriented undergraduate module which uses this concordancer. Software features include the organization of texts and presentation of source information for readymade corpora, and methods which can be used to reveal useful starting points for register analysis of do-it-yourself corpora.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1Register
- 2.2Data Driven Learning
- 2.3Software for register analysis
- 3.tPM’s readymade corpora
- 4.tPM tools for DIY corpora
- 5.Introducing register to undergraduates using tPM
- 5.1Teaching context
- 5.2Course outline
- 5.3Reflections on trouble-spots and solutions
- 6.Conclusion
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