POTENTIAL OF CORPUS TECHNOLOGIES IN LEARNING PHRASEOLOGY AND SLANG

Corpus linguistics is an effective and powerful tool in theoretical linguistics and linguodidactics. Different types of corpora (monolingual, bilingual, specialized, parallel) allow for a comprehensive study of language in real use, taking into account frequency, context, and variability. Consideration of phraseology and slang in the corpus dimension demonstrates that corpora open up wide opportunities for studying and teaching these units in real communicative contexts. To evaluate effectiveness of the corpus approach, the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) were used to develop and test exercises for learning phraseological units and slangisms adapted to A2-C1 levels. The exercises include tasks for meaning, translating, context completing, paraphrasing and case using. The exercises were created on the basis of frequency data from the BNC and COCA corpora. Practical testing shows increase in learning vocabulary, increase in number of correct answers in lexical and grammatical competence tests, as well as activation of productive writing and speaking skills. A comparative analysis of the corpus-based approach with traditional teaching methods reveals its many advantages: material authenticity, focus on frequency, and ability to work with real-life examples. At the same time, certain difficulties are also recorded, in particular those related to technical difficulties for some students and insufficient training of teachers in use of corpora.