Linguistic corpora in foreign language teaching

This article discusses some possible uses of electronic linguistic corpora in foreign language teaching. It looks at the Corpus of Contemporary American English created by Mark Davies as the largest open access corpus of English available today. The paper defines what a linguistic corpus is and describes its main characteristics. It focuses on the advantages of using corpora over dictionaries, including dictionaries of collocations and synonyms, and the Internet considered as an enormous corpus of texts. The article offers a classification of linguistic corpora according to various criteria. Particular attention is paid to learner corpora, which consist of texts written by learners of a language rather than its native speakers, and their role in studies of second language acquisition. Learner corpora help to create dictionaries, grammars, textbooks, and reference materials based on the analysis of common errors made by language learners. They provide special recommendations or guidelines to particular language speakers to prevent them from making typical mistakes caused by differences in the systems of their native language and the one they are learning. Further, the paper lists possible research objectives and practical tasks that linguistic corpora can help us fulfil in translation studies and teaching a foreign language. These include lexicographic objectives meant to verify the data given in the dictionaries and compensate for the lack of valuable information on language use and frequency of occurrence there. Linguistic corpora are also useful in studying word-formation patterns and the derivational potential of linguistic units. In addition, they are extremely instrumental in helping translators check their hypotheses and use the most natural collocations and grammatical structures. The paper explains how linguistic corpora are annotated or tagged to enable them to help linguists, translators, teachers, and language learners use them for their purposes. Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English as an example, we describe its composition and structure and define its place in the classification of linguistic corpora that we developed. Finally, we offer some recommendations and sample tasks that can be given to language learners to help them answer their specific questions. These include searching for collocates (words that occur nearby a given word), building lists of synonyms and checking their compatibility with other words, studying the derivational potential of morphemes, creating lists of keywords on a certain topic, studying new words in their natural contexts through concordances, etc.

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