APPLYING CORPUS APPROACH AT THE ENGLISH CLASSES IN HIGHER EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS

Abstract

The article describes the possible ways of applying the achievements of corpus linguistics in the ESL classroom at the HEIs. The notion of a language corpus was defined, a journey into the history of the first corpus creation was taken, and the most popular modern English-language corpora (British National Corpus, The Oxford English Corpus, COCA, etc.) were considered. The efficiency of applying the corpus method in teaching a foreign language in higher education has been proven. Thus, the use of corpora in students' work along with the inductive method contributes to their understanding of the basic linguistic patterns and the development of linguistic intuition, the material of the study being exclusively authentic texts. The possibility of using direct and indirect corpus approach to assist the formation of students' lexical, grammatical, stylistic and phonetic skills has also been studied. The direct applying this method may include teaching corpus linguistics to university students as a purely academic subject, performing certain tasks or exercises using concordance programs and performing individual research projects by students. And the indirect corpus approach can include publishing links, developing materials and language testing. The article provides information on special software that enables one to carry out corpus training and analyzes the main types of tasks that can be created using these programs. Finally, the article discusses the reasons for the unpopularity of the corpus method in the Ukrainian HEIs at the present stage of education and justifies the appropriateness of its wider use in the future academic environment.