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Part of
Current Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse: Global context and diverse perspectives
Edited by Yun Xiao and Linda Tsung
[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse 10] 2019
► pp. 266–295

Chapter 13
Specialised corpora for Chinese language education in Singapore

| SCCL, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
| SCCL, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
| SCCL, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Corpus linguistics is crucial to language education, but many corpora do not pay enough attention to curriculum and pedagogical needs. To address this issue and in view of Singapore’s unique language environment, the Singapore Centre for Chinese Language built two specialised corpora for Chinese language education in Singapore, which comprise a Written Corpus and a Spoken Corpus. The Written Corpus provides information on Chinese characters, vocabulary words and sentence structures used in written materials daily; while the Spoken Corpus provides guidelines for attainable spoken proficiency of primary school students at different academic levels. With these corpora, curriculum developers can design syllabi with greater precision on the language content and address the learning gap for Chinese language proficiency. As for teachers, an online resource platform developed based on the Written Corpus provides them with authentic materials and practical applications (such as the text grading module) as reliable tools and resources for lesson preparation and learning assessment.

Keywords: Specialised Corpora for Language Education, Singapore Daily Written Chinese Corpus, Singapore Primary School Children Spoken Chinese Corpus, Singapore Chinese Language Teaching Resource Platform, corpus application
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Specialised corpora for language education
  • 3.Data collection
  • 4.Data processing
  • 5.Results of the Written Corpus
  • 6.Results of the Spoken Corpus
  • 7.Application of the corpora
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scld.10.13goh
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