The corpus principle – Quotations

Introduction

Quotations are a great resource for the language classroom. They are thought-provoking and memorable. Unlike the spontaneous examples of language that we are often forced to think of on the spot in the classroom, quotations are real and autonomous in meaning (unless someone has been quoted out of context, of course). A quotation is, in effect, a complete text, albeit a small one. In the classroom, we can use quotations as a basis for language study as well as for a springboard to get our learners speaking and writing.

In 2003, a sister project of the Wikimedia Foundation called Wikiquote was created as a free online encyclopedia of quotations. It is now the biggest single quotation collection in the world. If you want quotations, the internet is the place to come.

In this article, we are going to look at a number of activities and techniques which involve quotations. The important point is that all of the quotations used were obtained using the corpus principle and this will be discussed throughout. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that we can create engaging and useful activities using non-conventional corpora such as:

• www.quotationspage.com
• www.wikiquote.org

Themes

Think of a theme (money, perfection, love, etc) that you would like your students to talk or write about in class. Go to one of the quotations sites mentioned above and type it in. When I typed ‘money’ into the search window of one site, for example, I was given 606 quotations. I chose the ones that I thought would work best with my students. I then copied and pasted these into a word document.

Here are some things that could be done with these texts:

1. Dictate them to your learners.
2. Use them for the basis of a running dictation.
3. Play 'Chinese whispers' with them.
4. Give the list to your learners and ask them to choose their three favourites.
5. Change them to misquotes and get your learners to look for the mistakes (e.g. Young men wish; health, money and love. One day, they’ll say; love, money and health).
6. Get your learners to find out more about the people that said them.
7. Look for points of grammar that can be examined. For example, in the above eight quotations, there are five cases of the word ‘does’: Four of these are auxiliaries and the other is a main verb. Can your learners work out which is which?
8. Use them to make gap fills.
9. Get your learners to translate them into their own language. Then take away all the copies of the original quotations and get them to translate them back into English.
10. Use them to engage learners for a speaking or writing activity.

Vocabulary and collocations

Finding thematic quotations would have been possible without the internet. Many quotation books categorise by theme, after all. But the corpora principle allows us to go further, and if you have online access in the classroom, a quotation site can be a very effective resource.

Imagine during a discussion about money, your learners get confused between the verbs borrow and lend. You take a note of this and find a convenient moment to type these words into one of the search sites. It would quite simple to find one or two good examples, bookmark them and show them to your learners at an appropriate moment.

In fact, I find that this type of activity works much better as homework. Show your learners how to use a quotation site and give them a small list of words to take away with them (words that have arisen during the lesson, for example). Their task is to find, for each word, a good quotation that contains it. (NB It is always a good idea to make learners aware of tools such as these in order to equip them with the resources they need for self-study. A learner of mine recently told me that thanks to his own quotation search efforts, he now finally felt that he had come to 'understand although.') It is also easy to look for quotations that contain collocations. 

Grammar

Although it can be a bit more difficult to find quotations that highlight the specific points of grammar that we might want to address in class, it is still possible.

Here is an activity that I prepared for one class following a situation in which my students were inadvertently introduced to and confused by the 'the-the' structure ('The more I see you, the more I love you').

So how were these quotations obtained? More specifically, the question to ask is: What feature do they have in common that would allow them to be found using a corpus-style search?

If you look at all nine of them, you will see that each contains the same consecutively-occurring little word pair: 'the more'. This is exactly what was typed into the search window in order to get them (quotation marks included).

Similarly:

• To find quotations that contain conditionals, type in ‘if’.
• To find quotations that contain have to (obligation), type in 'have to', 'has to' or 'had to'.
• To find quotations that contain modal verbs, type in ‘won’t’, ‘should’, ‘might’, etc.

Conclusion

The corpus principle is the best way to look for good quotations that can be used in class. The sites that have been addressed in this article are all examples of non-conventional corpora. That means that they have not been created specifically for linguistic investigation. However, their usefulness for doing so and also for creating quick tailor-made and effective activities for our learners shouldn’t be overlooked.