An investigation into corpus linguistics as a tool for consciousness-raising:A relative clause case

The present study aims at helping native speakers of Farsi learning English as a foreign language by drawing at corpus linguistics and input-enrichment to teach English relative clauses. Due to the lack of correspondence between Persian relative clauses (only one) and those of English, most Iranian students of English have problems mastering English relative clauses. The purpose is to provide an effective way to teach these types of structures by overloading students with a bunch of bold examples of them, thus raising their consciousness. Two classes of fifteen students were chosen for the study: a control group and a treatment group. Members of the treatment group were provided with wordlists containing lexical co-occurrences of English pronouns (wordlists were taken from Brown Corpus). Results indicated that overloading students with a bunch of different lexical co-occurrences of English pronouns is a useful way in teaching relative clauses

Keywords:

Computer technology , corpus linguistics , relative clauses , pronouns , language studies