Google is special among search engines in that it has become a starting point for enquiries and data searches of all forms. As most of this data is linguistic, it deserves special attention from language teachers, but until now, search has been largely ignored by most course writers.
In this article I give several practical examples of how you can use Gffoogle, combined with a lexical approach to teaching, to enrich your class material with authentic examples, as well as building learner autonomy.
Google and lexis
Lexis, as most of you will know, is simply another term for ‘vocabulary’. The Lexical Approach treats language as a series of prefabricated lexical chunks. Its methodology puts grammar in second place to vocabulary.The approach I will outline here is based on inputting ‘lexical chunks’ (strings of vocabulary or phrases) into Google’s various search functions to find samples of real world text. These are split into different types.
How Google treats language
This is a little complicated. What you need to know is that…
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