THE ADVANTAGES OF USING CORPORA IN TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Corpora can be used to study purposes with which words are used in a text and the circumstances under which they are used. This work considers the advantages of using corpora, carefully designed collections of written texts, in teaching of English as a foreign language. With Internet and computers widely accessible in classrooms, using corpora in language methodology is a functional and useful means to improve and enhance the interpretative and productive skills of learners as well as their ability to learn. This work’s focal points are some aspects of using an on-line corpus, to provide a communicative context in English language learning.
Since online corpora and tools for analyzing of corpora are becoming increasingly accessible, corpus based research as well as studies have become increasingly common as are their uses in teaching languages and language pedagogy.
Written and spoken varieties can be investigated regarding their preference determining patterns in language use, individual style of given authors or speakers depending on social background or different situations, registers. Monolingual as well as multilingual dictionaries are a good collection of information on meanings that can be expressed by a word and on its translations.
However, dictionaries cannot list all possible contexts, in which a word can be used and which can influence the translation of the given word into another language. In teaching English as a foreign language, it is advisable to adopt a communicative approach, in which words are not treated as isolated units or references to concepts, but as means of communication between the speaker and the hearer, concentrating on the meaning and usage of the given word or phrase.