THE USE OF CORPUS LINGUISTICS FOR INFORMING ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN EFL SETTINGS

Abstract

The advent of corpus linguistics revolutionized the world of linguistics and language teaching. This paper aims at exploring some theoretical considerations about corpus linguistics and explaining the relevance of corpus linguistics to the teaching of English as a foreign language. Even though the first computer corpus was generated only in the 1960s, a lot of corpora such as the ARCHER Corpus, the Bank of English and the British National Corpus are available online today. These corpora enable to study grammatical and vocabulary items across many registers and to find out how those items are used by native speakers in different contexts. For instance, Melrose (1983) found that in oral communication, while Americans use “have to” more frequently, the British prefer “must”. Furthermore, the use of corpus linguistics has significantly improved the teaching of English as a foreign language. That is the reason why Richards (2001) encouraged EFL teachers to familiarize themselves with computer technology so as to be able to carry out corpus research for their classroom practices. The use of corpora enables teachers to get authentic materials for their lessons and avoid the contrived language used in most EFL textbooks. Finally, corpus linguistics has enabled lexicographers to publish corpus-based dictionaries such as The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English which often provide the most common words or constructions with which the words explained occur. These dictionaries have improved the teaching of vocabulary, especially in EFL settings.