Enhancing Development of Communicative Skills in English through Teaching English Collocations in a Corpus-based Approach

The author of this paper will substantiate the argument that communicative creativity and development of foreign language learners may be enhanced through carefully selected corpora which are applied as a useful tool in the second language pedagogy. Corpora constitute the easiest way to access the contexts in which given words and phrases appear to be suitable for native speakers of a particular language. This means that with their help learners have the opportunity to acquire the actual language which is used in everyday conversations by various groups of people. Moreover, corpora can save a lot of time, because learners can focus on language that they need in appropriate situations for determined communicational tasks. That is why learning collocations with their support can be easier and faster. The aim of this paper is to investigate how corpora can be applied to teaching and learning of English and whether they are truly indispensable for educational purposes. Accordingly, the results of empirical research consisting of observations and tests conducted among the Polish students of secondary schools will be shown to prove how the creative abilities in their communicative performance may be reinforced with the acquisition of English collocations