Enhancing EFL Teaching With An Advanced Tool

As a tool for linguistic study, electronic corpus has a history of about half a century. But as an assistant tool in language education, corpus is a new study field in applied linguistics. With the development of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), the role of corpus in foreign language teaching has been recognized. Currently, as a kind of advanced teaching and learning resource tool, corpus is proved to have great potentials in facilitating language teaching and learning. Consequently, corpus-based language teaching has become a major study field in language and foreign language teaching. Some specialized English corpora have been successfully developed in China in the last decades, providing statistics for curriculum design, or resources for research in areas such as interlanguage development or in the study of some special language genres. However, compared to the achievements all over the world, the application of corpus in actual English classroom in China bears less fruit. One reason is that the concept of corpus is still unfamiliar to most EFL teachers. The other reason is the lack of English corpus with an orientation for facilitating English teaching and fit for English teaching environment, which blocks the EFL teachers' attempts in the field of corpus-assisted English teaching.Under such background, it is significant for foreign language teaching field in China to construct an English corpus oriented towards assisting English teaching. On one hand, it could provide a new approach to teaching English by which learners are enabled to learn authentic English, to grip the different meanings of the same word in different contexts, and to gain awareness of the characteristics of language variety. On the other hand, under the influence of rapid development of computertechnology, the need for using new techniques, improving teaching methods and teaching quality challenges EFL teachers to update their teaching approach. Therefore, compiling an English corpus for EFL teachers certainly will promote the wide use of corpus in English teaching.As one part of CNU project to develop a corpus and a concordancer for TEFL, this thesis presents an implementation study that focuses on the design and compilation of the CNU Corpus at initial stage. First, the thesis introduces the developmental history of corpus and concordance, and general applications of corpora in data-driven learning, reciprocal learning, syllabus design and language test. This thesis argues that the corpus-assisted language learning environment provides the possibility of convergence for constructivist learning theory and communicative teaching approach, which theoretically supports for the development of CNU Corpus, a corpus oriented towards practical English teaching. Then, this thesis gives a thorough comparison among the available English corpora and their application in English teaching. On the basis of comparison, it argues for the need and practical significance to develop the CNU Corpus that will serve as a resource tool for corpus-based language teaching. Thirdly, centering on the research question-as a resource tool, how should the CNU Corpus be framed?-this thesis demonstrates the design of the corpus, the need analysis on EFL teachers, and data collection and sorting in detail. In the last chapter, some theoretical and practical problems met during the research are put forward and discussed, and then this thesis concludes with a discussion on the problems in the process of design. Additionally, this thesis points out the limitations of the current research and puts forward several suggestions for further study.