Effectiveness of Corpus in Teaching English Synonyms

Corpus in Teaching English Synonyms

Abstract

Synonymy, an intricate linguistics feature, is considered one of the challenging facets in teaching English as a second language. It is a tough task for English teachers to teach every synonym pair. Therefore, enabling English language Learners (ELLs) to use the existing corpus data could help them to learn synonyms by exploring and analysing the collocational and colligation patterns of synonyms in a corpus to achieve accuracy in language usage. This research aims to explore how naturally occurring discourse of corpus can be used to teach different functions of synonyms effectively. Sketch Engine (SkE) tool was used to analyse the collocation, concordance, word sketches and sketch difference of synonyms arrive and reach in British National Corpus (BNC). Moreover, the Longman Dictionary of
Contemporary English (2014) was used to study different senses of synonyms arrive and reach. It is found that there are more meanings associated with reach than arrive suggestingwide occurrence and usage of reach. SkE also revealed that the frequency of reach is much higher than arrive in BNC. It is found that there are some similarities in grammatical categories of collocates and syntactic patterns of both the synonyms in BNC as synonyms reach and arrive occur mostly with the subject on the right and preposition on the left.However, the frequency of some of the grammatical features is different for both thesynonyms and there are considerable differences in the syntactic patterns of their colligation.The results of this study reveal that analysis of a naturally occurring corpus can be used as an effective strategy to distinguish and teach the synonyms arrive and reach in ESL classroom. The study recommends the use of corpus-based analysis in language teaching which may clarify synonym misuse and enhance the vocabulary of language learners.