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Russian Language Journal

Authors

Edie Furniss

Keywords

corpora, language, pedagogy, linguistics, lexicon

Abstract

The increase in availability and sophistication of corpora in recent years has facilitated the application of usage-based approaches to language pedagogy. Although the use of corpus data is certainly not without its difficulties, it offers great pedagogical promise. Corpora, consisting of natural language culled from a multitude of sources and genres, provide valuable information about language in use. While a corpus can provide us with contextualized linguistic data and statistics on the behavior of lexicon (with respect to frequency and collocation), a connection needs to be forged between the data and their practical use. Two main areas ripe for the application of corpus linguistics are data-driven learning and materials development. Data-driven learning concerns the study of language by learners who use corpora to obtain raw data for analysis (see, for instance, Johns 1991, Gavioli & Aston 2001, Varley 2009).

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