Using Irish Language Corpora in the University Classroom

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This paper concerns the use of electronic corpora in the Irish language courses taught at the Celtic Section, Uppsala University. Corpora are increasingly being recognised as an important tool in language teaching, in particular at university level. For example, electronic corpora can make up for a lack of suitable textbooks and grammars, a problem facing both teachers and students in Uppsala. I will present my experiences of working with the PAROLE Irish Distributable Corpus (Corpas Náisiúnta na Gaeilge) to find instances of use that can help explain grammar rules and to create grammar exercises and assignments, as well as to provide material for student term paper projects. In my experience, an electronic corpus is an important tool for the teacher, providing an easily accessible source of authentic examples that reflect actual use and this is of particular benefit in teaching a foreign language. However, there are also problems and caveats involved when working with an electronic corpus regarding the set-up, compilation method, documentation and necessary search and concordance programmes, which I will also address. Electronic corpora have been used in linguistics since roughly the 1960s but it is only recently that they have started to be used in language teaching.1 Gradually, teachers have realised that reliable information about various aspects of language use cannot be provided by textbooks or introspection only. Instead, more and more teachers now turn to electronic corpora to retrieve relevant material from a large variety of authentic sources. Electronic corpora are widely available, affordable, and easy to use. Today, many textbooks, grammars and other teaching materials are based on corpus-derived data. However, whereas this development is well underway in the teaching of some languages, especially English, the situation for Irish, being a lesser used language, is vastly different. The emergence of electronic corpora of contemporary Irish is very recent. As a consequence, there are still very few resources available to teachers of Irish who want to use corpus linguistic methods in class and teaching material based on corpus-derived data.