The Impact of Corpus Linguistics on Language Teaching in Russia’s Educational Context: Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Corpus linguistics (CL) is one of the most dynamic and rapidly developing areas of modern linguistics. It affects all areas of linguistics, including methodology of teaching foreign languages, translation and other linguistic disciplines. The reviews of publications on this subject include only the works published in English and do not reflect the contribution of Russian researchers. This article fills this gap by presenting an overview of the disparate publications of Russian authors by examining the dynamics in the growth of the publication number, the geographic distribution, publication outlets, citations, focusing on the studies on the application of CL methods in education in Russia since 2011 till the first half of 2019. Methods of finding relevant publications and processing the resulting body of the data in order to obtain answers to the research questions are described. The discussion indicates that most of the work contains guidelines on the CL use in teaching various aspects of the Russian and foreign languages with the involvement of large general-purpose corpora that are freely available on-line. Only a small number of studies present the results of pedagogical experiments. It is noted that the selected indicators make it possible to assess the degree of CL approach influence on education. Drawing on the analysis, we propose the ways of expanding the implementation of CL methods in language teaching by increasing their use in different disciplines of the pre-service teacher training program and in-service training of contemporary foreign language teachers.