Increasing Naturalness in the Language Learning Classroom : Towards a Corpus-Informed Principled Communicative Approach

This volume links corpus research to classroom practice and critically assesses how the integration of a corpus-informed methodology affects pedagogical choices, teaching materials and classroom activities.

Focusing on the language classroom, and drawing on examples from English, French, German and Hungarian, this book demonstrates that such methodology is applicable to languages with very different properties. Drawing on both larger, general and smaller, more specialised corpora, including both spoken and written data, this volume:• presents the key features of natural language according to corpus linguistics, establishing principles and methods to observe and practice natural-sounding language use;• suggests the characteristics of a coherent, corpus-informed methodology and contrasts this with existing methodologies;• explores ways in which this methodology can enhance language learning and discusses the types of activities that are most effective;• explains how this methodology be integrated into teacher training. Bridging the long-persisting gap between corpus-informed language teaching research and applied classroom reform, this book is key reading for researchers in applied linguistics and language pedagogy, as well as teacher trainers and practitioners.