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

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.