Abstract:

Collocational competence as part of a student's linguistic competence is the primary focus of the lexical approach in foreign language teaching. This approach, introduced in 1993 by Michael Lewis, maintains the idea that lexis is the basis of language and therefore prizes vocabulary over grammar such that the essence of language acquisition for a student is the study and reproduction of lexical units – i.e. collocations, chunks and fixed expressions.

Today, consistent with the modern trends of computerization and digitalization in education, the practice of working with electronic linguistic corpora has become an essential skill for students of all levels as it fosters their linguistic guess, enhances their speech fluency and accuracy and develops their collocational competence. The use of corpus linguistics technology also contributes to the development of a students' critical attitude to some linguistic phenomena and strengthens their IT skills.

Thus, the aim of this paper is to review some basic corpus tools that can be used in teaching vocabulary and analyze the educational potential of corpus linguistics technology in FLT.

Keywords:

Collocational competence, lexical approach, corpus linguistics technologies.