BEING AUTONOMOUS EFL LEARNERS BY THE USE OF A CORPUS A Case Study of Mental Verbs across Genres in the Learning of Lexis and Grammar

Abstract

In this paper, I will show how a corpus may take EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners a step closer to be autonomous. A group of randomly selected EFL learners was asked to navigate the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) with focus on mental verbs. This type of verb is selected, as in general, mental verbs (e.g, to think, to confirm, to agree, etc) are commonly known to take human agent. This study is aimed to show how mental verbs are actually used in diverse English texts. The finding of this study has shown that mental verbs might have non-animate agent such as report, finding, document, result etc, especially in academic section. This shows that successful language learning requires proper usage as shown by linguists following the works under the scope of Systemic Functional Grammar and Neo-Firthian School. By using corpora, a teacher may shift from the sole source of information to a facilitator, and in turn, may take learners a step closer to be autonomous. Keywords: Corpus Linguistics, autonomous learners, English as a Foreign Language, mental verbs