Data-driven Learning in the Classroom: The Use of British National Corpus in Teaching Vocabulary

Abstract

Corpus (or corpora 14pl.) is well-known as the best linguistic database as it enables researchers to seek for data in real use context. In 1960s and later decades, linguistics scholarships have focused on data resulting from elicitation, including introspective method. Corpus, then, becomes a breakthrough in the field of theoretical linguistics, language variation studies, and so forth. However, the use of corpus is not limited to language research, rather it can also be used to enrich language classroom activities by having data-driven learning. By conducting this data-driven learning in the classroom, students are capable of figuring out many linguistic aspects which cannot be obtained by only listening to teacher 19s explanation or reading text book. Moreover teacher can make use of corpus to vary the learning sources and materials. This paper therefore aims at describing the use of English corpus, British National Corpus, in teaching English. Regarding the wide coverage of corpus role in language teaching, this paper will focus on the use of the corpus in teaching vocabulary: what are the activities that can be done in the classroom with corpus assistance? What can corpus offer to vocabulary teaching