Corpora and metaphor awareness. A seminar for EFL students at a Faculty of Political Sciences

This paper features the analysis of the use of corpus data in L2 learning and it is the result of the seminar ‘British press and the euro currency' we held at Naples University Federico II. The course was aimed at students undergoing the second exam of English language in a Faculty of Political Science. Part of their traditional course work involves the analysis of linguistic structures and rhetoric strategies that characterise the language of politics and economics. We therefore thought that the corpus we had edited, the British Press and The Euro Corpus (BPEC), could be a useful tool to raise language awareness through metaphor recognition and analysis. The corpus consists of web retrieved articles published by the periodical The Economist and by the newspapers Guardian, The Times and The Financial Times between July 1 2001 and June 30 2002 and dealing with the European single currency.Since it was conceived as a pilot seminar to test the validity of corpora in the classroom, and organised for attendance in the computer lab, only 20 students among those attending the course were chosen.Each of us met the group of students five times for a two-hour session each week, for a resulting twenty-hour course work. In particular, the sessions were divided in the following way: the first two sessions offered a general introduction to the use of the relevant concordancing software so that learners might therefore proceed to the analysis of the BPEC under our supervision. Secondly, we introduced the corpus and the importance of a cognitive approach to the analysis of metaphors for a critical interpretation of news articles. We then explained how concordances could prove a valuable tool in detecting systematic patterns of language use to convey ideological stance.In all sessions students were encouraged to maximise the use of the L2. In order to stimulate student reflection on language we asked the students to work in pairs or in small groups of three/four people and to discuss with their partners their opinion in order to reach a common interpretation of the examples provided. At the end of each exercise the groups had to make a presentation of their findings to the rest of the class justifying them with examples drawn from the analysed concordance lines.During the last two lessons students were asked to work individually to plan their final report, consisting of an account of the activities carried out during the seminar and a short description of the attitude towards the euro of one of the papers represented in the British Press and Euro Corpus, using the information they had gathered on the different metaphorical domains analysed throughout the semester.Results were encouraging since most students were particularly interested in using a software that could help them gain a better understanding of the texts they had been exposed to. They also felt that working with a computer proved more stimulating than traditional approaches to text comprehension and analysis.