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Multiple Affordances of Language Corpora for Data-driven Learning
Edited by Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska and Alex Boulton
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 69] 2015
► pp. 63–84

Learning phraseology from speech corpora

| School of Languages and Literatures, Translation and Interpreting University of Bologna

There is substantial evidence that phraseology is key to fluency in speech production and reception, particularly in cognitively/affectively demanding contexts like interpreting. Yet most second language speakers have limited repertoires of phraseological items, lacking knowledge of their lexicogrammatical, functional, and also of their prosodic aspects. Speech corpora which align transcripts with audio can readily be constructed from subtitled video materials, and learners can use these to view and hear concordanced data. Examples are provided for phraseological items documented in a one million-word corpus of talks from the TED – Ideas worth spreading site (www.ted.com), analysed using WordSmith Tools (Scott 2012). Activities for performance with and by learners are also suggested, aimed at increasing their phraseological awareness and expanding their repertoires.

Keywords: interpreting, phraseology, speech corpora, subtitles, TED talks
Published online: 13 May 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.69.04ast
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