Use of Collins WorldBanks Online Corpus in Teaching English as a Second Language

Use of Collins WorldBanks Online Corpus in Teaching English as a Second Language

Okicic, Melisa

This paper discusses the use of corpus linguistics sources, in particular, the Collins Worldbanks Online Corpus in terms of its characteristics and possibilities for linguistic analyses, which may significantly improve the process of teaching English as a second language at the university level. This Corpus contains 57 million words of written and spoken English, from both American and British sources. It is worth mentioning that, according to our knowledge, the corpus linguistics databases such as the British National Corpus, the Brown Corpus or the Collins Worldbanks Online Corpus, etc. are not available at the faculties in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to give a detailed overview of the structure and the basic terminology of the Collins Worldbanks Online Corpus such as query, concordance, sketch-diff etc. with special reference to a practical use of this corpus in a teaching process in terms of studying vocabulary and collocations (e.g. a proper word usage of the nouns man vs. male, or the verbs request vs. require), thus drawing attention to the importance of this significant linguistic tool which, hopefully, will be recognized as such and will be available all across the faculties in Bosnia-Herzegovina in near future.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

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