Corpora In Language Teaching Essay

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Tim Johns (1986, 1991) suggested that the use of corpora in language learning could have numerous positive effects on EFL/ESL students’ and teachers
‘way of describing a language, the potential of corpora for language pedagogy was widely acknowledged (Hunston, 2002). The role of corpora to the language learning environment had not developed for the last 50 years because until the 1980s, researchers did not start to emphasize that corpora could have a beneficial influence on foreign or second language teaching and learning (Chambers, 2007). However, the use of corpora has also inspired heated debates among linguists since it was introduced into the field of foreign/second language teaching. Widosown (1991), for example, took issue with both the usefulness of corpora and …show more content…

He suggested that language learners, teachers and researchers should regard language descriptions arising from corpora as factors to be considered rather than facts to be uncritically incorporated into language teaching. According to him, language teaching should be informed by the descriptions that are emerging from corpus linguistics, rather than determined by it.
Sinclair (1991) approved Widdowson’s claims by stating that:
‘Corpus linguistics has no direct bearing on the way languages may be presented in a pedagogical context. Corpus linguistics makes no demands on the methodology of language
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Effect of corpus-based material on improvement of receptive skills among Iranian EFL advance learners teaching. It is not geared to serving any particular method and the current software is quite neutral’ (Sinclair, 1991 p.489-99).
Despite the intense debates among linguists about whether to apply corpora to language teaching, some EFL teachers and researchers strongly claim that the use of corpora is very beneficial for EFL learners because corpora bring the natural and

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