The usage of corpus tools and technologies in teaching and assessing English

With the rapid development of the computers and the Internet, the education in general and the process of teaching in particular have undergone considerable changes. Teaching methods and techniques have been adapted to modern, computer-based realities. So far, a lot of techniques in terms of teaching languages with the help of computers and the Internet have been discovered. One of such techniques is considered to be the use of different corpora in teaching foreign languages.
This article overviews the literature on the development of corpus linguistics as a science and its implementation in teaching languages. It also identifies different corpus tools and technologies and their possible application in teaching foreign languages. In addition, the effectiveness and teaching potential of corpus technologies in the development of communicative competence, namely, writing competence, as well as the ways of integrating corpus technologies into the learning process are described. Finally, examples of assignments based on corpus data taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) are provided in this article. The experiment has been carried out among the 3rd year students of Uzbekistan State World Languages University (USWLU) using quantitative and qualitative data collection tools. Such corpus technologies as concordances, corpus statistics, text analysis tool, as rich illustrative materials, were applied in elaboration of the exercises and tasks. The experiment results have shown that implementation of corpus technologies in language teaching classroom appears to be effective to foster writing competence of learners. In addition, presented teaching materials and assignments can be implemented independently by students as a mini-research project.