Vocabulary expansion is essential for learners to gain proficiency in L2, but learners’ lexical knowledge has not drawn much research attention in SLA (Howarth, 1996). In an attempt to throw light on a neglected aspect of learners’ competence, this paper investigates the use of a lexical item in the writing corpora. In particular, it compares the frequency and distribution of intensifiers in the EFL corpus with those in a native English corpus. The result of the frequency analysis in the EFL corpus offers an evidence of significant overuse of the limited types of maximizers and boosters, which in turn result in the inflated frequency of intensifiers. Further, the present study uses the mutual information score to measure the strength of the bond between selected intensifiers and adjacent lexical items. The result does not clearly demonstrate associations between the intensifier and the adjacent words due to the small corpus size, but it provides some possible pedagogical implications for L2 teaching. The frequency information rather than the information on the strength of associations between intensifiers and adjacent words, for example, would be more helpful to EFL learners.

This paper aims to compare generic features of a specific genre in Korean and English language. For this purpose, written advertisements from magazines in two languages were compiled and small corpora of equivalent genres were analyzed from a perspective of comparative genre analysis. The focus of analysis was given to the ‘lexical’, ‘structural’, and ‘other choices’, by exploring the discourse values within a specific context. The case is to raise foreign language learners’ awareness of language form within a meaningful context, represented in a relevant genre. In this study, the comparison is narrowed down to written advertisements through cross-linguistic comparison. It shows that comparative corpora of familiar genres can be used to help learners realize the ways FL is explored to achieve particular communicative goals. Furthermore, it can lead naturally to the discussion of cultural and social aspects reflected in the language.

Recently, the use of corpus has been very popular in almost a11 areas of language research, as a means of exploring the actual patterns of language use. The rnain goal of this paper is to show the possibilities of and advocate exploiting corpus for English language education. For this goal, it first provides a basic understanding of corpus by describing the types of corpus, issues in corpus design, and the use of a concordancing prograrn in analyzing corpus. This is fo11owed by the discussion of three different ways in which corpus can contribute to English language education. First, the content of English teaching can be improved by the rnore accurate and detailed description of the target language that is provided by corpus-based research. Secondly, corpus analysis itself can be adopted as a language teaching methodology, in which learners discover various facts about English by thernselves. Fina11y, analysis of learner corpus can help us diagnose and solve the problems that the learners typica11y have.

This study examines the effects of corpus-based collaborative learning on the intake of grammar rules among high school students. This study is grounded on three theoretical backgrounds: Grammar teaching based on a large amount of input enhances intake; peer interaction promotes learners’ participation and has positive effects on their academic achievement; and discovery instruction stimulates learners’ motivation and helps them notice rules, leading to the conversion of input into intake. The subjects were divided into two groups, each group consisting of 60 students. The subjects studied six grammar rules over a period of six weeks. Group 1 did small group activities with the materials extracted from the COBUILD corpus, while Group 2 was given the teacher’s explanation of each rule with some examples designed to show how the target rule works. After each grammar lesson, both groups took a post-test. The results indicate that (a) corpus-based grammar learning helps engage learners in the learning process and raise their grammar awareness, (b) corpus-based learning facilitates noticing and identifying the target form better than its meaning and (c) peer interactions in a small group have positive effects on the intake of grammar rules.

This study analyzed English words that are used in the middle school English text books of the 6th and the 7th National Curriculum in Korea. For this analysis, an English corpus of a total of 1,230,023 nodes was built out of 63 English textbooks of the 6th and the 7th National Curriculum. The study specifically investigated the following items for analysis: 1) tokens and types of words used in the middle school textbooks, 2) frequency of the words, and the numbers of new words introduced in each school-year, 3) high-frequency words in the textbooks with reference to those in large-scale general English corpora, 4) parts of speech of the words and their frequencies, and 5) the comparison of the words used in reading parts and listening parts. Analysis of the corpus revealed the following results. Regarding the average number of tokens and types, the textbooks based on the 7th Curriculum contain more than those based on the 6th Curriculum. As for the frequency of the repetition of words, the 6th curriculum textbooks are more than the 7th curriculum textbooks. Comparison of vocabularies used in the text corpus and in general large-scale English corpus shows that there are more similarities than differences.