Abstract
The present study seeks to propose a novel pedagogical strategy for enhancing EFL students’ collocational usage of the node ‘coronavirus’ as currently used in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) across its five genre-based sections, viz. TV/Movies, Blog, Web-General, Spoken, Fiction, Magazine, Newspaper, and Academic. Drawing on a corpus-driven approach, we conducted a pedagogical descriptive analysis of the ‘coronavirus’ top collocates generated by the COCA. The target collocates have been calculated by the Mutual Information (MI) of 3 or above and specified in terms of the four main lexical parts of speech of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The study has reached three main results. First, employing the COCA as a pedagogical corpus tool can enhance the collocational competence of EFL students should a corpus-driven approach be used descriptively in the classroom. Second, the two methodological stages of demonstration and praxis could facilitate the process of topical priority as a significant index of collocational usage and its thematic relevance. Third, more empirically, the naturally occurring collocates of the node ‘coronavirus’ have proven significant to the pedagogical situation of teaching the node’s collocational meanings encoded in the syntactic categories of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, e.g. infection, cause, novel, and closely, respectively.
Highlights
Corpus-bereft research on collocations and their EFL usage can be said to remain captive of a good deal of misconceptions about the pedagogical nature of teaching and learning vocabulary at large
Drawing on limited sets of data, research of the sort has offered results about EFL collocational usage that are insensitive to balanced genres in the target learning language, not least because the various patterns of co-occurring words have been conspicuously absent from the analysis of lexical items with collocates used in various domains of human experience
Towards the collocational analysis of ‘coronavirus’ in the Contemporary American English (COCA), we adopt a corpus-driven approach of the extended lexical unit [9, 10] as a methodological tool whereby the following research question can be addressed: How can the COCA be utilized in enhancing EFL students’ collocational usage of ‘coronavirus’?
Summary
Corpus-bereft research on collocations and their EFL usage can be said to remain captive of a good deal of misconceptions about the pedagogical nature of teaching and learning vocabulary at large. Towards the collocational analysis of ‘coronavirus’ in the COCA, we adopt a corpus-driven approach of the extended lexical unit [9, 10] as a methodological tool whereby the following research question can be addressed: How can the COCA be utilized in enhancing EFL students’ collocational usage of ‘coronavirus’?. The question raised above should highlight the significance of the present study as a highly pedagogical and empirical medium for EFL teachers as a community of practice It is through such a medium that innovative corpusdriven methods can be used for easing EFL students’ comprehension of the collocational meanings associated with lexemes of wide-scale thematic relevance and topical interest within the same community of practice.
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