Abstract:

The article reports on applying the findings of corpus-based linguistics to language teaching and learning. Corpora are used by computational linguists, lexicographers, language researchers, translators and are being actively applied to EFL teaching. Ever since their emergence corpora have served as a key tool for providing an empirically-based description of language use. Its new potentials for language structure and use have many applications in linguistics and language teaching.

We introduce the idea of using corpora in the Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al 2004), a leading corpus tool which has been used for lexicoraphy and language research in various ways since 2004. It is the source of providing students and teachers with an authentic empirical data from corpora. The purpose of this study is to present practical steps in using the Sketch Engine through SkELL, its state-of-the-art web-based language learner interface, aimed at students and teachers of English language. SkELL stands for Sketch Engine for Language Learning which is a simple tool for learners of English to easily check whether or how a particular phrase or a word is used by English native speakers.

In the present research work, we use the data-driven learning (DDL) approach which allows the language larners to discover and explore independently language patterns and rules applying techniques and tools from corpus linguistics. DDL was first coined by Johns in 1991 and has demonstrated to be a pioneering method which is drawing an increasing attention to language education. DDL encourages students to analyze and organize the empirical data, to act as the initiators of the language analysis rather than its passive recipients.

The paper makes a careful insight into the contribution of corpus analysis to language teaching that has been successfully introduced by the authors at the Higher School of Foreign Languages and Translation Studies, Kazan Federal University, Russian Federation. The article outlines practical considerations for the integration of language corpora in an EFL teaching, presenting classroom activities in mastering linguistic structures and functions using Scetch Engine through SkELL.

DDL differs from traditional language teaching approaches in that it introduces one of the leading tenets of Dalton Education: if the teacher does all the work, the students don't learn anything. Following McCarthy (1998), the authors bring up the three I's mehod: Illustration – Interaction – Induction into the EFL classroom. Illustration is when students look at real empirical material, but not artificially made-up 'toy language', integrating corpora and concordance software. Interaction is when students and teachers discuss and analyse together the ways of practical application of DDL methods in the classroom using Sketch Engine through SkELL, sharing different views and hypothesis. Induction is drawing conclusions about certain linguistic phenomena presented in the corpora and their use in practical language activities.

Corpora is a valuable source for language teaching. Corpus-based DDL contributes to developing students' motivation, formation of their independent learning abilities, self-discovery, helps them to use authentic context to obtain the words semantics and grammar patterns.

Keywords:

Data-driven learning, corpora, EFL, student, teacher, classroom.