How Can the Use of Frequency Information From Corpora Be Used in Foreign Language Teaching? A Corpus-based Study on Vocabulary in Course Books

Diploma Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: A,, course: Angličtina, language: English, abstract: How can corpora be used to improve vocabulary learning in language acquisition? This thesis focuses on the use of word-frequencies by teachers of English. Teaching vocabulary to young learners is one of the most challenging responsibilities that teachers face. The methodology chosen for the presentation of vocabulary is crucial for the learning success of the students. There is a great amount of studies on how computers can facilitate the learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) and with the development of immense corpora both teachers and students now have access to hundreds of millions of words and the possibility to explore their occurrence patterns. This advantage is, however, rarely used in practice, partly due to the relatively short existence of this discipline but most importantly due to the lack of information about corpora in English language teaching (ELT). This paper will present the concept of course book vocabulary and present word frequencies in learner's dictionaries. The research part of this thesis deals with a linguistic analysis of data extracted from course books and their comparison with the Oxford list of 3000 essential words. The aim of the thesis is to investigate the linguistic attributes of texts forming course books and to examine their relation.