USING LANGUAGE CORPORA TO INFORM ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF THE PHRASE MAKE SENSE FOR CLASSROOM PRACTICE

Abstrak

There has been a great deal of interest in language corpora in applied linguistics (Biber et al., 1998; McEnery & Hardie, 2012) and educational linguistics (O’Keeffe, McCarthy, & Carter, 2007; Reppen, 2010) in the past decades. Language corpora have been explored and examined to find out more about natural language use in authentic contexts (Sinclair, 1991; Biber et al., 1998) and enrich classroom resources (Gavioli & Aston, 2001). However, despite a great deal of publications, how language corpora are used in English language education in Indonesian context is still limited. To address the gap, this study aims to shed light on how Indonesian language teachers could benefit from using an English corpus for their teaching practice. Specifically, the study offers critical explorations and examinations of how English phrases are constructed in authentic language use and their structure and collocation variations. To do so, a corpus-based methodology was employed using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the phrase make sense was chosen for analysis. The data collection involved corpora queries (i.e. searches for one-word insertions, two word insertions) and prepositional collocations. To analyse the data, concordance lines, collocational patterns, and frequency distributions were first observed. Then a specific examination looked upon how the meaning and its structural variations expand. The findings show that make sense can co-occur not only with degree-related words (e.g. makes no sense, makes perfect sense, makes more sense) but also with domain related words (e.g. makes financial sense, makes economic sense, makes business sense). Make sense could also be constructed in extended sequences (e.g. make the most sense, make absolutely no sense) and be followed by various prepositional phrases (e.g. make sense of, make sense to, make sense for, make sense in). The corpus evidence shows that make sense is a flexible phrase that allows speakers to express degrees of judgement as well as specify perspectives and conditions. These findings show how English language teachers can develop corpus-based teaching materials and use them with more natural and context-appropriate language use.