Teaching Grammar through Literature to EFL Learners: A Corpus Approach

Mamona Yasmin Khan, Nausheen Rasheed, Shaheen Rasheed

Abstract

A plethora of researches have been conducted to improve the grammar teaching technique of English language in order to make it easier for the students to learn English in a fun way. To teach the grammar, the corpus approach proves to be very beneficial. The focus of this study is to explore the way how literary poems can be of great use for teaching English language to the students, by using a Simple Concordance Program Scp (4.09). For this purpose, we have selected four English poems. This is an exploratory research. This study investigates the ways in which the application of Corpus Analysis Tool on poems can assist English language teaching. Hence, it makes it easy for the students in ELT classrooms to comprehend the grammatical structures. The results illustrate that the Scp (4.09) tool helps in extracting the words with higher frequency rate but as well as in the teaching of imperative, conditional sentences, present (indefinite, continuous and perfect) and simple past tenses, as it provides the concordances of the words. Further researchers can find out the word collocations by using the same tool. Moreover, the selected poems in this study, can be analyzed through other corpus tools available. This study can also be expanded to the stylistic analysis of the poems. The literary devices used by both poets can be studied, compared and taught to the students.