A Corpus-based Instruction on Synonyms in the EFL Classroom

This study is a corpus-based analysis of synonyms (war, warfare and battle), aiming at assisting EFL learners with how to distinguish the differences and similarities of semantically analogous words through the utilization of abundant authentic corpus data and to apply them appropriately in a real contexts. For this purpose, Birmingham’s Bank of English (BOE) which consists of 450 million words and 20 sub-corpora and AntConc 3.2.1w concordancing program have been utilized. Based on the results, the importance of appropriate language use in different contexts, and the authentic application of these into the real EFL classroom, will be suggested in terms of how corpus analysis can contribute to the EFL learning environment.