An Empirical Study of Corpus Application in the Teaching of English Writing

The cultivation of writing ability has always been one of the teaching goals of English majors. It is listed as the five skills of English learning along with listening, speaking, reading and translation. Nowadays, people gradually realize that most Chinese college students’ English writing ability is not very satisfactory. One of the problems is that most students are affected by their mother tongue. The Chinese way of thinking hinders the development of their language skills, thus restricting further language learning. English corpus is of great help in terms of vocabulary, grammar usage, monitoring and verification of the correctness of language output. In this paper, the author combines the teaching practice of English writing with the application of English corpus, and conducts research on its effectiveness. Results show that students’ language errors in compositions are reduced, their vocabulary becomes richer and more diversified, and students’ feedback is very good. Besides, this method can also encourage students to learn independently to improve their writing skills.