Abstract:

The paper is devoted to corpus-based approaches to teaching technical English vocabulary. Starting with an overview of the major monolingual and multilingual corpora implemented in the research, various corpus approaches to teaching terminology in ESP are described. In addition, it represents our experience in choosing and adapting texts, making vocabulary and grammar exercises for technical students of Kazan Federal University.

Teaching specialized vocabulary is very essential as it has such a great pitfall as the danger of presenting decontextualized language to students which reduces or even eliminates students’ awareness of collocations and colligations.

In this case, work with language is greatly facilitated by corpus linguistics methods and, in particular, its tools since they enable to reveal linear relations between linguistic units which are not obvious while using traditional approach. A general-language corpus of the Russian language, Russian Learner Translator Corpus as well as the British National Corpus , the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English provide a broad empirical basis for corpus-based teaching of the usage of technical terms and for evaluation of constraints and preferences associated with specific vocabulary. The most essential advantage of applying corpora in foreign language teaching is its reliable empirical basis, constant updating, and availability of proof of using a lexical unit in different meanings from a multiple number of sources of different genres. All these factors positively affect the process of learning, stimulate students to enhance their knowledge of language, show them and teach them vital self-education skills. The given work deals with teaching technical English vocabulary via monolingual and multilingual corpora, work with parallel corpora, containing frequency and collocation related data, which are particularly significant for grasping the basic primary meaning of a term and mastering its secondary derivative meanings in other vocabulary layers.

Keywords:

Corpus-based approach, teaching terminology, ESP.