British National Corpus in English language teaching of university students

The article deals with the application of corpus-based
direction in English language teaching of university students, suggested
by Ukrainian scholars. The most representative corpus for English
language teaching (ELT) is the British National Corpus (BNC), which
offers many opportunities (e.g. search for specific word forms, search for
word forms by lemmas, search for groups of word forms in the form of
syntagms, etc.). The article presents the methodological algorithm of
university students' work with the BNC during English classes based on
the verbs denoting human emotional states. The methodology of work
with BNC consists of three stages: 1) a student has to compile the initial
lexicographic register of basic verb denoting emotional states; 2) a
student has to measure the frequency of each unit in the corpus usage;
and 3) a student has to analyse, described and record all corpus
calculations. The main benefits of the findings for the future relevant
studies may be described in the following way: the work with corpus
tools in ELT is aimed at students performing the following successive
steps: 1) processing concordances, 2) calculating the absolute frequency,
3) analysing the left and right valence, and 4) modelling clusters to build
cognitive-semantic profiles of the studied units, which will allow
university students to understand the essence of every grammatical,
lexical, and syntactical unit.
Keywords: Corpus-based direction; English language teaching; British
National Corpus; Methodological algorithm; university student