Development of students’ collocational competence based on corpora

Abstract

Introduction. The development of students’ collocational competence is one of the main goals of foreign language teaching in a linguistic university. Achieving this goal is possible through the use of corpora. However, the implementation of the methods for the development of students’ collocational competence based on corpora requires the selection of teaching content and the development of learning stages that combine classroom and distant, online and offline learning forms and allow students to work independently with the data of linguistic corpora. The purpose of the study is to develop methods for the development of students’ collocational competence based on corpora. Materials and methods. The study involved 2nd year students (N=44) studying “Linguistics” (profile: “Theory and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages and Cultures”) and “Pedagogical Education” (profile: “English Language”) programmes at Derzhavin Tambov State University (Russian Federation). In order to test the methods effectiveness for the experimental group, a selection of collocations was carried out and a hybrid learning methods was developed, which includes project activities (classroom and distant) and consists of three stages. Participants in the control group studied a practical English course using traditional printed teaching aids. The subject of control was students’ collocational competence. To process the obtained results, Student’s t-test was used. Research results. The study shows that both teaching methods are quite effective for the development of collocational competence of linguistic university students (control group: t = 12.82, p ≤ 0.005; experimental group: t = 15.64, p ≤ 0.005). At the same time, statistical processing of data when comparing the results of the experimental cut between the control and experimental groups proved the effectiveness of the author’s methods of teaching collocations based on corpora (t = 2.54, p ≤ 0.005). Conclusion. The novelty of the study lies in the formulation of methods for the development of students’ collocational competence based on corpora, which consist of three stages and includes classroom and distant, online and offline forms of education. The results obtained can be used in the development of methods for a foreign language teaching in general and lexical competence in particular on the basis of corpora, as well as in the development of methods for foreign language teaching based on other modern ICTs.