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Developing Linguistic Literacy: Perspectives From Corpus Linguistics And Multi-Dimensional Analysis, Douglas Biber, Randi Reppen, Susan M. Conrad

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In their conceptual framework for linguistic literacy development, Ravid & Tolchinsky synthesize research studies from several perspectives. One of these is corpus-based research, which has been used for several large-scale research studies of spoken and written registers over the past 20 years. In this approach, a large, principled collection of natural texts (a 'corpus') is analysed using computational and interactive techniques, to identify the salient linguistic characteristics of each register or text variety. Three characteristics of corpus-based analysis are particularly important (see Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1998):(1) a special concern for the representativeness of the text sample being analysed, and …