Enhancing EFL Students’ COCA-Induced Collocational Usage of Coronavirus: A Corpus-Driven Approach

Abstract

The present study seeks to propose a novel pedagogical strategy for enhancing EFL students’ collocational usage of the node ‘coronavirus’ as currently used in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) across its five genre-based sections, viz. TV/Movies, Blog, Web-General, Spoken, Fiction, Magazine, Newspaper, and Academic. Drawing on a corpus-driven approach, we conducted a pedagogical descriptive analysis of the ‘coronavirus’ top collocates generated by the COCA. The target collocates have been calculated by the Mutual Information (MI) of 3 or above and specified in terms of the four main lexical parts of speech of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The study has reached three main results. First, employing the COCA as a pedagogical corpus tool can enhance the collocational competence of EFL students should a corpus-driven approach be used descriptively in the classroom. Second, the two methodological stages of demonstration and praxis could facilitate the process of topical priority as a significant index of collocational usage and its thematic relevance. Third, more empirically, the naturally occurring collocates of the node ‘coronavirus’ have proven significant to the pedagogical situation of teaching the node’s collocational meanings encoded in the syntactic categories of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, e.g. infection, cause, novel, and closely, respectively.