British National Corpus in English Language Teaching of University Students

Abstract

The article deals with the application of corpus-based direction in English language teaching of university students, suggested by Ukrainian scholars. The most representative corpus for English language teaching (ELT) is the British National Corpus (BNC), which offers many opportunities (e.g. search for specific word forms, search for word forms by lemmas, search for groups of word forms in the form of syntagms, etc.). The article presents the methodological algorithm of university students' work with the BNC during English classes based on the verbs denoting human emotional states. The methodology of work with BNC consists of three stages: 1) a student has to compile the initial lexicographic register of basic verb denoting emotional states; 2) a student has to measure the frequency of each unit in the corpus usage; and 3) a student has to analyse, described and record all corpus calculations. The main benefits of the findings for the future relevant studies may be described in the following way: the work with corpus tools in ELT is aimed at students performing the following successive steps: 1) processing concordances, 2) calculating the absolute frequency, 3) analysing the left and right valence, and 4) modelling clusters to build cognitive-semantic profiles of the studied units, which will allow university students to understand the essence of every grammatical, lexical, and syntactical unit.