Recently, the activity of “Communication with Mentors----A Salon for Teachers and Postgraduate Students”, hosted by Graduate Students’ Affairs Department of the Party Committee of Nankai University and undertaken by Academic Department in Graduate Union of the College of Foreign Languages, has been held at 110 meeting room in the 7th academic building. In this activity, Li Min, Associate Professor in the College of Foreign Languages in Nankai University, Executive Director of China Association of Ecolinguistics, Director of China Pragmatics Association, was invited to give a lecture named “Corpus and Foreign Language Learning”. More than 30 graduate and doctoral students participated in this activity.
This lecture focuses on the development, functions and studies of corpus. Li Min started this lecture with a question, “what are differences between corpus and terminological database？”After leading a round of discussion, Li Min pointed out that the former paid more attention to the data of natural language while the latter is a professional database of a certain field. In order to further deepen students’ understanding and grasp of corpus and arouse students' interest, he listed several typical and compelling examples of corpus analysis to show that corpus is mainly about frequency and these studies of corpus is the textual analysis through co-occurrence of high frequency. Then, Li Min shared knowledge of corpus with students in terms of its definition and its central topic of discussion and briefly explained the evolution of corpus and its applicable scope, encouraging students to conduct academic research through corpus.
After the lecture, students actively discussed and asked questions. Besides, they said that they reaped substantial benefits from this lecture, and their understanding of and interest in corpus studies and learning were further enhanced.
