Сorpus research tools in L2 teaching

The aim of the article is to inform professional readership of corpus analysis potential for L2 teaching purposes, which is based on the author's own implementation experience of corpus-based activities in L2 classroom. Thus, the article is divided into four sections, including Introduction (1), Corpus Tools (2), Examples of Classroom Use (3) and Conclusion (4). Introduction outlines the recent corpus-driven changes in attitudes to language statistics, which are reflected in corpus-informed text books. Section Two, which has nine subsections, deals with corpus tools and notions of corpus analysis (concordance, collocation and colligation search, corpus statistics, semantic prosody etc.) in L2 teaching context. In particular, the author discusses condensed reading, concordance vertical scanning for lexico-grammatical profiling and other teaching tools to develop L2 linguistic competence. These are later supported (Section 3) by some corpus-oriented classroom activities with possible teaching outcomes outlined. Some experience-based comments are also given regarding the language level of students that could benefit from corpus data analysis. Based on the research results, Conclusion elaborates on the idea of corpus competence as well as the necessity of corpus tools to be used by both language teaching professionals and students. Theoretically, as was initially suggested by data-driven teaching pioneers, not only the researcher, but also the learner should be given the chance of studying language through corpus. The article advocates that corpus tools for collocation search together with colligation (or probable grammar structures) detection are powerful means to develop both language and research skills. In addition to corpus-based activities and theoretical grounding behind that, the author also shared her own experience on compiling a corpus of professional discourse. Both the idea and the practicality of a small university-made corpus are evaluated. A brief comparison of a diversified corpus (such as the British National Corpus) versus a "home"-made corpus is provided. The research also draws attention to a term chunk of language, which has been adopted by western teaching methodology, and is being considered in the article through frequency - probability (corpus) terms. It is suggested that a chunk of language bigger than a collocation lends itself to being discovered through the combination of various corpus tools. These frequent language chunks (such as there is certain stigma attached to...) account for a large part of native speaker's vocabulary and fluency. They are believed to be stored in memory in great amounts and retrieved virtually undivided. Chunks could be subject to minor colligational corrections while speaking. The author believes that frequent language chunks could be discovered by language learners as an educational research activity under the guidance of a language instructor. As has already been mentioned, the article provides some research activity examples in Section 3. Thus, the article will equip the reader with a clear understanding of corpus linguistic potential in the foreign language classroom as well as with the capacity and confidence to engage in corpus analysis. It might be particularly beneficial for non-native speakers of English who happen to teach English in ESP context, since the author believes that corpus research ends the monopoly of language intuition, which in today's world is being gradually replaced by corpus statistics.

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