吴福焕博士

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摘要

Corpus linguistics is believed to be crucial to language education. But as revealed by McEnery and Xiao (2010) many corpora are less supportive to language education. One major reason is their overwhelmed interest on pure linguistic issues which neglect the needs of curriculum development and applicability to language teaching. Aware of such pit-falls, the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language has attempted to build two specialized corpora for Chinese language education in Singapore, namely the Singapore Daily Written-Chinese Corpus (hereafter as "Written Corpus") and the Singapore Primary School Children Spoken-Chinese Corpus (hereafter as "Oral Corpus"). The written corpus aims to provide information to curriculum developers on the characters, vocabulary and sentence-structure commonly used in written materials engaged daily by students; whereas the spoken corpus aims to demarcate attainable oral proficiency of primary children at different academic levels. The written corpus has a total size of 2.6 million characters, containing written materials such as newspaper, magazines, storybooks, flyers, notices and brochures etc. The spoken corpus has a size of 1.7 million characters, consisting of one-on-one interviews, classroom lessons and home activities of students aged from 7 to 12. With information from the two corpora, curriculum developers will be able to identify the draft gap that their curriculum should narrow so as to ensure basic Chinese competence for Singaporean children. For teachers, the two corpora will serve as reference and resource of authentic materials for their teaching. And a further developed text grading system using the written corpus as a base has equipped teachers with a reliable tool for text selection, lesson preparation and language assessment.

关键字 : Written Corpus; Oral Corpus; Chinese Language; Singapore