Diary: Presentations: Laptops, new softwares, green movement and other stuff: part two

Presentation is definitely an art. It is a skill that should be developed. The presentations that we all have had have provided us with a very clear message: We all should work more on the art of presentation. Americans are good examples. They are real experts in turning everything into a show, even a war. I can vividly remember the very first day The United States attacked Iraq. They had live reports from inside the tanks heading towards the battlefields. They successfully transformed reporting a naturally dirty stuff into something exciting. There are useful sources available online on tips and points about making an effective presentation. A simple search on the World Wide Web will definitely show us some.
In this entry I have tried to review another paper in the book Innovation in English Language Teaching which I was supposed to present but I couldn't because of lack of time.

The Uses of Computerized Language Corpora: A Reply to Ronald Carter by Guy Cook
As the title implies, this paper is about the potentials of computerized language corpora in applied linguistics and consequently in teaching. But it should be mentioned that the author adopts a critical approach towards this issue. As the title, once again, states, this article is actually a reply; a reply to someone who is an advocate of using computerized language corpora in teaching. But it is also worth mentioning that this reply mainly tries to criticize the extreme views in this field and in order to this, Guy Cook, the author, chose a writer who actually employed a moderate perspective towards the issue.
The author first starts his article by the inspirations that computerized language corpora have had. He states that all these findings are important and may have some implications for language teaching, but he believes that some corpus linguists overreach themselves. These linguists, he believes, put extraordinary prominence on computerized language corpora. Because of this extremist view, the author tries to pursue some of the shortcomings of corpus-driven approaches and while doing so, tries to differentiate the hard and soft line approaches. Some of these false conclusions are:
1- They are the only valid source of facts about language
2- They provide a goal and a route
He states that, computer corpora, even as record of facts are incomplete. They contain information about production but not about reception. He also believes that as records of language behavior, computer corpora do not necessarily and directly tell us how people organize and classify language in their minds.
The author clearly expresses his opposition against the above-mentioned extremist view when the corpora start being used not as data for descriptive linguistics, but as sources of prescription for TESOL. He asks this question that why the attested language use of a native-speaker community should be a model for learners of English as an international language. This prescriptive view implies that foreign learners must follow the native community. He rejects this idea by saying that the foreign learners may not want to study language in this way; they may live in culturally diverse pedagogic traditions not compatible with this approach; they may not need native-like English; they may not have as much time available and etc.
He continues the article by mentioning the hard line. He says that there is a belief that a linguistic revolution necessarily constitutes a pedagogic one.
In this article, the author tries to contrast the soft line and hard line views of the relevance of corpus findings to language teaching.

Some notes:

Writing such an awful review is not an easy task. I believe this review is awful partly because writing a review on a reply without being provided with the original document is a completely useless. This was the problem which I had when I was trying to find a way to put this article in a reasonable presentation format.