Abstract
Negative first-language (L1) transfer is a common source of unidiomatic language use as learners often assume that words, phrases, collocations and other idiomatic expressions can be translated word for word. This chapter outlines a fun group activity that introduces learners to parallel corpora to tackle such unidiomatic language usage.
The proposed paper-based data-driven learning (DDL) activity encourages learners to find more idiomatic ways to translate difficult words or phrases from their L1 into English by analysing concordance lines from TV and film subtitles. The chapter features a few examples, and the appendix includes detailed instructions for teachers to create their own worksheets on any language issue of relevance to their students.
The activity draws on the subtitle subcorpus of the multilingual InterCorp corpus via the free corpus interface KonText. It can be adapted to the full range of proficiency levels and for more than 40 different learner L1s.
Optionally, more advanced students can be introduced to the web interface to conduct their own parallel corpus searches online.