Using Corpora for Promoting Student Self-Learning in English Education

计算机语料库是一种大量的口语和书面语篇，自20世纪90年代以来一直被广泛应用于语言学研究，并取得了巨大的成就。然而，语料库在英语教学课堂上的实际应用却很少。本研究的目的是探讨在英语教学中使用语料库的有效方法。本文考虑了在英语课堂中使用语料库的目的和目标。语料库是提供自我获取实际英语口语和书面语范例的好资源。作为一个长期目标，有人建议鼓励学生在学习英语时使用词典和语料库，特别是在英语写作方面，而不是在教师的帮助下。建议的主要具体目标是让学生通过在语料库中搜索实例来学习常用短语，并让他们有机会从实例中推断出一些英语规则。英国国家语料库的使用程序是在阅读和听力课上开发的。搜索语料库以找到词典中没有列出的单词和短语的例子，并提供从这些例子中推断它们的含义的机会。语言现象，如英式英语和美式英语在拼写和词汇方面的差异，都是通过使用Brown、LOB、FLOWN和FLOB语料库教授的。在朗开斯特-IBM英语口语语料库的韵律特征教学中，如降调与句尾的关系、重音转换等，学生被要求从例句中推断规则。在专门用途英语的教学中，我们考察了研究论文中使用的表达方式，并根据研究结果提出了摘要写作的教学方法。

Computer corpora, large bodies of spoken and written texts, have been used intensively since 1990 for linguistic studies and great achievements have been made. However, there has been little practical application of corpora in the English-Language Teaching (ELT) classroom. The aim of the present study is to investigate effective ways of using corpora in English education.Objectives and goals for implementing the use of corpora in the ELT classroom were considered. Corpora are good resources for providing self-access to examples of actually spoken and written English. As a long-term goal, it was proposed that students be encouraged to use both dictionaries and corpora in learning English, especially in writing English, without the help of teachers. The proposed major specific objectives were that students learn frequently-used expressions by searching examples in corpora, and that they be given opportunities to infer some rules in English from the examples.The procedure for using the British National Corpus was developed in reading and listening classes. The corpus was searched to find examples of words and phrases which were not listed in the dictionary, and opportunity given for inferring the meaning of them from the examples. Linguistic phenomena, such as differences in spelling and lexis between British and American English, were taught by the use of the Brown, LOB, Frown and FLOB corpora. In teaching prosodic features, such as the relationship of falling tone and 'sentence' ending, and stress shift, students were instructed to infer rules from examples in the Lancaster-IBM Spoken English Corpus.For teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP), expressions used in research papers were examined, and methods for teaching the writing of abstracts were also proposed, based on the findings.