Is using concordances effective in teaching English grammar (Raise/Rise and Since/For) as a foreign language in Vietnamese classrooms?

• The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of corpus linguistics, with a specific focus on the concordances in teaching and learning English in Vietnam. The concordance samples provide teachers and students with the information about the different patterns of use and structure that can be found for each word. I have designed a new kind of linguistics exercises on the basic of the selected list of concordances samples mainly from the British National Corpus (BNC). This kind of exercise was first experimented in an English lecture at Cantho University-Vietnam for the freshmen- English Education class. Such exercise consists of a grammatical part which purpose is to learn how to distinguish the uses of words like Raise/ Rise and Since/ For. In order to evaluate the differences in using concordances or not while doing these exercises, the teacher divided the students into two groups: one was using concordances, one not. Students from the second group whom used concordances, obtained more correct answers than those from the first group, whom did not, and the second group could develop the activeness in exploring the word structures and rules. The study reveals that it is still a challenge in applying concordances in English teaching and learning. However, the second group had good results and the feedback from the survey on evaluating the concordances use in language learning was highly appreciated. This helps us see more clearly the promising future of applying corpus linguistics (typically concordances) in English classrooms in Vietnam.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

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