Making Vocabulary Corporeal: Arabic Learners, Vocabulary Development, & arabiCorpus

Abstract

Recent years have seen increasing integration of language corpora into second language instruction. Arabic’s rich polysemy and multiglossic spectrum can complicate vocabulary development for learners. Corpora thus offer great potential as complementary tools for Arabic learners. This study examines two variants of a corpusbased exercise used with fourth-semester adult Arabic learners. Learners analyzed data for select Arabic vocabulary items in the online arabiCorpus. Students in both variant groups proved themselves adept at using the corpus, interpreting data, and articulating metalinguistic hypotheses about nuances of meaning.

Keywords

• Corpus-based language learning
• vocabulary building
• Arabic
• arabiCorpus.