A Study on the Composition of the Russian National Corpus and Its Educational Use: Focusing on the Main Corpus

Abstract

The corpus, which is based on authentic texts produced by language users, is a practical resource in terms of language education and research. However, unlike in research and teaching of English corpus has not yet been actively utilized in the fields of research and teaching of second foreign languages including Russian. This is primarily due to the lack of researchers and teachers with relevant knowledge, which leads to the absence of teaching using corpora and the discontinuity in follow-up research. Therefore this paper examines in detail the annotation system and search tools of the Main Corpus ― one of the subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus (RNC) — and presents some methods for its educational use. Among several subcorpora constituting the RNC, the Main Corpus is the most representative and balanced one. It is equipped with rich morphological, semantic, syntactic annotation systems and metadata, enabling the sophisticated search and analysis of linguistic phenomena. Moreover, since it provides visualizations and simple statistical data, it can also be utilized in academic research. This study — on a trial basis — constructs simple activities involving the use of data from the Main Corpus in the fields of lexicology, morphology, word formation, and syntax. It will be up to future research tasks to explore how RNC's other subcorpora can be used in education; how useful concordancers such as AntConc and Sketch Engine are distinguished from the RNC; and how to use them in language teaching.