EXAMINING RUSSIAN TERTIARY-LEVEL STUDENTS' ATTITUDES TO THE USE OF A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH IN LANGUAGE CLASSES.

The paper explores the application of corpus linguistics in language teaching and introduces the results of a pilot educational research project aimed at the evaluation of Russian university students' attitudes to the use of a corpus-based set of classroom activities to study English pronunciation. The corpus-based approach exemplifies data driven learning, it generates learner autonomy by training students to draw their own conclusions about language use. Two of the most challenging topics in practical phonetics classes for Russian EFL tertiary-level students are varieties of spoken English and connected speech processes. Normally EFL learners in Russia are not exposed to spoken varieties of English in their everyday life and they find both production and comprehension of fluent English speech rather difficult. The designed activities exploited deliberately chosen corpora for students to make their own discoveries about pronunciation patterns. In this study, pre- and post-experiment survey data as well as observational data were gathered from a group of 54 students in an effort to access their attitudes to the corpus-based language learning. Descriptive statistics tools were used to process the results from the questionnaires. To calculate the significance of differences in the responses given by the subjects, chi-square analysis was employed. Open-ended questions were processed analyzing key words and key word frequencies. The results of the research demonstrated the statistically significant difference of the students' attitudes to the use of corpus-based activities in the classroom before and after the experiment, that have changed from being uncertain to positive. This change can be explained by the participants' low level of corpus linguistics awareness before the experiment and their realization of its benefits as a result of corpus-based classroom activities in which they participated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]