Abstract:

Developments and findings in corpus linguistics have become followed by an increasing number of materials and resources for use in language teaching and learning that are labelled as corpus-based. However, many important findings in the field of corpus linguistics are not usefully mediated in terms of their implications for language teaching and learning.

The aim of our research is to find out the relevance of corpora to language teachers and to identify what findings can be seen as key and may lead to new pedagogical insights for English teachers. Our research focuses on the needs of the learner in relation to authentic data and establishing benchmarks by which levels of proficiency in vocabulary knowledge can be assessed.

The materials that will be analysed have been designed for both lower and higher proficiency levels. The software available on the internet will be used for checking the words and phrases to provide evidence about their real occurrence in speech or written texts, which can be used by teachers in their classes when they need to decide which expressions native speakers use in real life. Three aspects such as accuracy (language competence), appropriateness (sociolinguistic competence) and naturalness are components of a speaker’s overall communicative competence and therefore need to be encouraged in language teaching. Learners need to know how to be accurate and appropriate, and which expressions occur in English more frequently and thus more natural.

To make it more useful, analysed excerpts will be compared with the words that are aligned to reference levels in the English Vocabulary Profile or the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, which provides symbols for words, meanings and phrases showing CEFR levels in consistency with the English Vocabulary Profile.

Keywords:

Corpus-based linguistics, the English Vocabulary Profile, accuracy, appropriateness, naturalness.