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52APPLYING CORPUS-BASED ACTIVITIES IN THE CLASSROOM Tursunov I.M.1, Toshmatova N.A.2
]Tursunov Ikhtiyor Musulmonqul o 'g 'li - Student, ELECTRIC ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT, POWER ENGINEERING FACULTY;
2Toshmatova Nazokat Akramovna - Teacher,
TEACHING LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT, MANAGEMENT IN PRODUCTION FACULTY, FERGANA POLYTECHNIC INSTUTUTE, FERGANA, REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
Abstract: the article under discussion depicts the importance of applying corpus-based activities in the classroom. The authors of the article described advantages and disadvantages of corpora after studying some research issues conducted in the target area. Keywords: corpora, language, technology, corpus, facilitate, phenomenon, behavior, observation, study, collection, computerized.
Since the middle of the last century, linguists have been using computerized corpora, or large principled collections of electronic texts, to facilitate descriptive analyses of language. In those early years, using corpora to study language (corpus linguistics) was little more than a technology. However, over the years, corpus linguists, as they have come to be called, have outlined principles to justify how and why this technology can be used by linguists. As a result, corpus linguistics has developed into a methodology within the field of linguistics. One of the primary principles which corpus linguists assert is that the study of language should be primarily an empirical endeavor and descriptions and theories of language should be based on the systematic observation of actual language behavior.
Collecting large amounts of text in order to analyze linguistic phenomena was not a new concept when corpus linguistics arrived as a methodology. As Meyer points out in a recent article, early dictionaries were based on a large body of published works and millions of citation slips of naturally occurring language. Furthermore, concordance lines (i.e., a word displayed within a surrounding context) as a format for displaying every instance of a word in a text or collection of texts has been around for centuries. In its original sense a concordance is a reference book containing all the words used in a particular text or in the works of a particular author (except, usually, the very common grammatical words such as articles and prepositions), together with a list of contexts in which each word occurs [1, p.p. 3-7].
Many EFL teachers find integrating corpus-based activities in their classrooms a challenging teaching practice. Moreover, some teachers avoid using corpora because they think that designing corpus-based activities is a challenging task. A lot of research has been conducted to examine the effectiveness of using corpus linguistics as a teaching technique to highlight how native speakers of English use certain language forms, vocabulary items, and expressions. Coxhead explains that the use of authentic and real-life examples with L2 learners is more beneficial than examples that are made up by the teacher and do not simulate real life use of language [2, p.p.213-238]. Another benefit of using corpora for language teaching is that it gives students the chance to actually work with language and analyze it.
Although corpora have started to be used in language classrooms, Varley argues that more research needs to be done to provide evidence that corpora are useful for language learning. Corpora is a relatively new trend in teaching, one can still find teachers who are skeptical with regards to corpora and whether they could be used to teach challenging language features such as modals and idioms. Simpson and Mendis (2003), on the other hand, investigated the usefulness of corpora in acquiring idioms. They wanted to explore whether idioms appeared in corpora or not. They examined a 1.7 million word corpus that included academic spoken English. They found that idioms are found in corpora and that corpora could be used to design teaching materials. Researchers also argued that corpora
provide students with information about the pragmatic use of idioms. Moreover, corpora provide students with authentic contexts, which means that students learn language in context and not in isolation [2, p.p. 213-238].
Many research issues were conducted to reveal the advantages of applying corpora in language teaching where Cobb highlighted that corpora provide both teachers and students the language in context. This will help students discuss language features more deeply in class. Beyer argued that after the training course, the teachers not only became familiar with using corpora, they became more aware of the language they teach and how to teach it. Corpora helped students to learn about certain language uses that were not available in any of the traditional tools. In addition, corpora allowed students to examine these language features in context. Another benefit was the fact that corpora helped students get a broader view of language. For example: corpora could compare spoken and written languages [3, p.p. 345-360].
On the other hand, corpora have their disadvantages as well as their benefits. One disadvantage is that some corpus software is not available for students. That is why the researcher recommended that teachers introduce their students to free corpora online. Another obstacle facing students is that when searching any corpus, students are confused because of the large amounts of search results. Therefore, Coxhead suggested that teachers need to simplify these findings for those students with limited experience using corpora. Research has proven that corpora could help improve students' language proficiency [2, p.p. 213-238].
To sum up, it becomes clear that corpora have a very big potential in language classrooms. It has been proven that corpus is beneficial but there are certain challenges that any teacher needs to keep in mind before using corpora. Both teachers and students need to be properly trained on how to use corpora. It is the role of the teacher to simplify corpus findings at the beginning until students get a better understanding of how to screen their corpus findings and analyze them. Otherwise, the process will become very confusing . One of the challenges that have been discussed in the previous review is the fact that designing corpus-based activities is difficult. In addition, it is very beneficial that teachers have ideas about these activities. According to Meyer, the teacher plays a very important role in using corpora to teach languages. However, this role has not been researched enough. Therefore, in her study, Breyer first investigates the role of the teacher in the use of corpora, and the challenges that face the teachers. She concludes that teachers have to be trained to use corpora in their classrooms. Moreover, teachers have to develop materials and activities using corpora because there are no 'ready-made' ones. They also need to make the activities suitable for their students' proficiency level and culture. In addition, teachers need to learn how to shift their role in the class to be monitors of the learning process [1, p.p. 3-7].
References
1. Meyer C.F. English corpus linguistics: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002. P.p. 3-7.
2. Coxhead A. A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly. 34, 2000. P.p. 213-238.
3. Cobb T. Breadth and depth of lexical acquisition with hands-on concordancing.
Computer Assisted Language Learning, 12, 1999. P.p. 345-360.
