An Analysis on the Practical Usage of the Word look

This study looks at the application of corpora to English language teaching, more specifically to English teaching materials in line with the perspective of Biber and Reppen (2002) that language learning should be based on naturally occurring genuine data. In accordance with this viewpoint, this paper aims to find if such discrepancies between the textbooks and the authentic data exist in terms of the highly frequent word look. In searching the genuine usage of the word look, the American National Corpus (spoken) was adopted and for the textbook corpus, scripted dialogues from different middle and high school Korean-English textbooks were compiled to make corpus data. The analysis showed that while the spoken American National Corpus data emphasized the transitive function of the target word with its co-usage with many kinds of [prepositions/adverbs], in the textbooks, the genuine meaning of the word to see as in the use of intransitive word was the primary focus in learning/teaching context. In addition to this, while the spoken American National Corpus showed abundant use of discourse markers, there were very few cases found in the textbooks. These findings suggest that textbooks should reflect the language that is currently in use and be updated continuously.