From Corpus To Classroom

The Use Of Aligned Corpora In English Language Teaching

Abstract

This paper introduces flexible computer-assisted approach to teaching and learning English in elementary schools. It is based on preparing, producing and dynamic exploitation of aligned bilingual corpus before, during and after lessons. The approach is grounded on recognizing the advantage of contextually rich paralleled input, containing English and Serbian texts, which enables non-linear learning, encourages pupils’ independence, provides wide repertoire of methods and teaching techniques, and enhances multiple-object orientation on several different language aspects simultaneously. All relevant circumstances concerning existing technical support and hardware and software equipment affordable in elementary schools have been taken into account. The emphasis of the cognitive dynamism initiated by the paralleled input used in learning and acquisition of foreign language has been presented both from the point of view of pupils and of teachers. The circular flux of attention from one version of the text towards the other, and vice versa, has also been captured and analyzed from the point of view of cognitive linguistics, with description of pedagogical valence of such shifts of attention in the borders of aligned English-Serbian corpus. Following description of pre-processing, selection of texts, tagging and the alignment process, we give the overview of some of possible applications of aligned English-Serbian corpus in everyday teaching and learning activities, along with potential future ramifications and improvements of the method. Predicting and implementing of those improvements in future perspective are becoming more viable thanks to the notable tendency of gradual moving of computer-assisted training and learning from the periphery towards the center of modern education.