The Contribution of Corpus Linguistics for the Development of Language Learning at High Schools in Iran

Applied linguistics is one of the most salient subcategories of linguistics which paves the way for language teaching and learning. Similarly, corpus linguistic studies, another subcategory of linguistics, show considerable benefits to language classrooms.Corpus-based studies not only serve language teachers by providing a basis for deciding upon the materials and the sequence to be taught, but also language learners by providing a comprehensive source to help them move toward native-like use and explore the language themselves. High school textbooks seem to be contrived and not corpus-based which lead to non-native-like use of language that seems meaningless to native speakers who would have trouble understanding these ill-formed structures. This descriptive research is to find practical ways for applying corpus linguistics in high school textbooks for development of language learning and teaching in Iran by designing corpus-based textbooks. Clearly, substituting natural and native-like texts for the contrived ones can be beneficial to both learning and teaching by providing a much richer learning environment and a natural and comprehensive source of the language.

Keywords:

Applied linguistics , corpus linguistics , language teaching , language learning