The Potential of Corpus Linguistics in Training Foreign Language Teachers Majoring in Computer Assisted Language Teaching

In modern world practice, Corpus Linguistics (CL) is gaining serious positions. The number of available corpora accounts several thousands which allows conducting various research in linguistics, cultural studies, sociology, history, cognitive linguistics and other humanities. The paper reviews some of the most substantial ones. Although CL has a remarkable impact on language teaching the literature overview shows that its potential is only modestly used in curricula of future language teachers and translators. The paper analyzes the role and place of CL in the curriculum of the Computer Assisted Language Teaching (CALT) Master program launched at SPbPU in 2016. The analysis of working programs of disciplines included into the CALT Master Program has revealed that most of them either contain special modules aiming at acquisition of and applying CL methods in research and teaching or allow integrating CL approaches in studying certain topics. The paper states that students have to acquire corpus literacy which means solving corpus search and research tasks of different complexity ranging from getting familiar with the corpus structure to compiling own subcorpora and dealing with heuristic type tasks. Three stages of students’ familiarization with big corpora are distinguished. The recommended tasks for each stage for the Russian National corpus developed by authors are provided. Further research is discussed.