Date of Award

3-2016

Document Type

Project

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Education

Department

Education

First Reader/Committee Chair

Diaz-Rico, Lynne

Abstract

As a lingua franca across the globe, English plays a vital role in international communications. Due to rapid economic, political, and educational globalization, the English language has become a powerful means of communication. Therefore, English education is vital to the development of many countries around the world. Since 1932, the need for a lingua franca in Saudi Arabia developed as the country progressed politically, economically, and educationally. Now, English is important to Saudis’ economic, educational, and career development and success.

Vocabulary is a major step in learning any language. By deepening students’ lexical knowledge, they will be able to use English accurately to express themselves. However, teaching words in isolation and through memorization is not highly effective; English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners need to interact with the language and its usage in a more profound way. This can be done by integrating corpora and stylistics analysis in an EFL curriculum. The importance of stylistics analysis to literary texts in the EFL classroom lies in the way that EFL learners will be exposed to authentic language. At the same time they will get insight into how English is structured; and by accessing corpora, which provide a wide range of data for the analysis of stylistics, students will be able to compare the lexical and grammatical patterns in authentic texts. Also, it is important to introduce students to the different levels of English (i.e. semantic, lexis, morphology); this will enlarge EFL learners’ knowledge of English vocabulary and various grammatical patterns.

This project offers an innovative perspective on how to teach English for EFL university-level students by using corpora in a lexicalized stylistics approach, which will enable EFL learners to acquire vocabulary by reading literary texts. This provides a rich environment of lexical items and a variety of grammatical patterns. This approach offers EFL learners analytical tools that will improve their linguistic skills as they interact with and analyze authentic examples of English and gain insight about its historical, social and cultural background.

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