Using A Japanese-English Parallel Corpus for Teaching English

Using A Japanese-English Parallel Corpus for Teaching English Vocabulary to Beginning-Level Students

Paraconc_6621-24375-1-PB.PDF

Abstract
 
Although recognized by educators as a potentially  useful tool, until now corpus application
has been limited because the English concordance examples retrieved have been difficult for
beginning-level learners to understand. The recent development of Japanese-English parallel
corpus programs have exciting potential for not only eliminating this barrier, but also in
facilitating inductive corpus-based language learning in ways that have not been possible in the
past. This paper will present evidence, from an on-going research project, of the potential for
using corpus techniques with beginning-level students in an English as a foreign language
learning context. The research areas that the  project investigated are the responses of the
students to concordance-based teaching activities, the learning outcomes of concordance-based
teaching activities in various learning contexts, and the optimum features of a computer
interface between the corpus and the users.