论语料库对以内容为依托的外语教学的促进作用

The Facilitative Role of Corpora in Second Language Content-based Instruction

以内容为依托的外语教学(Content-based Instruction简称CBI)把枯燥的语言知识与真实生动的内容有机结合起来,大大激发了教师和学生的兴趣,取得了良好的教学效果。然而在实际操作中,教师们常常面临学生程度差异大而教材内容单一,以及教学资源缺乏等困难。网络语料库的出现使这些问题迎刃而解。语料库对CBI的促进作用在内容教学和语言教学两方面都得到了充分体现:1)语料库能为学习者提供海量真实的语言输入;教师还可以根据教学内容的需要从语料库中选择适合不同水平学习者的语篇材料,提供有针对性的语言输入,一定程度上解决学生程度参差带来的困难。2)语料库规模大,功能多,检索方便快捷。语料库的语境共现功能可以快速呈现出一个词语在不同语言环境中的用法,让学习者能方便地归纳总结出语言使用规律,学到正确的搭配和符合英文习惯的表达,加深对语言和语篇知识的领悟。

Content-based Instruction（CBI） is a language teaching approach that aims to strengthen students’ language skills as well as their content knowledge by embedding language knowledge into meaningful and appealing contents.Because CBI can make learning more interesting and motivating,it has proved to be very effective in second language instruction.However,in actual teaching practice,CBI teachers are frequently confronted with problems such as lack of appropriate teaching materials,difficulties in teaching students with a wide range of proficiency levels etc.Luckily,the emergence of language corpora provides an easy solution to these problems.The advantages of corpora in promoting CBI are reflected in two ways： 1） Corpora can provide massive amounts of authentic language input,which makes it convenient for teachers to select topic-specific materials targeting language learners of diverse levels.The problems caused by gaps between students’ proficiency levels can thus be alleviated.2） Corpus concordance lines showing Key Word in Context（KWICs） make it easy for learners to study how a word is used in the language and learn correct collocations and native-like expressions,thus enhancing their understanding about the language.The present article is going to discuss how corpora can be incorporated into language instruction to facilitate learning.Key words： Corpus;Content-based;Second Language Instruction