Language Corpora for EFL Teachers: An Exploration of English Grammar through Concordance Lines

As it is clearly seen that English is used as an international language across the world, learning the language has great significance and value (Crystal, 2003). English learning and teaching can be enhanced to a greater extent by the incorporation of data representing authentic English derived from language corpora. Learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) are often found to be far more successful when grammar is introduced through corpus-informed data, which evidently promotes inductive learning in such a way that learners not only acquire grammar by language data observation and self-discovery of rules, but also find it entertaining and exciting to make grammar rule generalizations on their own (Cheng, 2012; Hunston, 2002). Furthermore, exposure to corpus data of real English also provides EFL learners with some evidence of how grammar is used in actuality, which may be different from textbook-based rules. The researcher found that graduate Thai EFL learners were very satisfied with learning grammar through corpus-informed data.

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