Corpus-Based Approach to Teaching the Kazakh Language: Adapted Experience for Anglophones

The article provides a detailed account of the development of an interactive corpus-based platform for teaching Kazakh to anglophones – Learner Corpus. The study begins with a comparative analysis of international and domestic practices in corpus linguistics, as well as an evaluation of the quality of existing textbooks and teaching materials designed for English-speaking learners. The analysis revealed that a substantial portion of current learning resources is insufficiently adapted to the cognitive, linguistic, and communicative needs of anglophones: systemic shortcomings were identified, including mismatched text difficulty levels, artificiality, grammatical and logical inconsistencies, and inaccuracies in cultural content. Based on these findings, criteria for selecting materials for the Learner Corpus were defined, resulting in the creation of more than 250 original narrative and communicative texts, a structured lexical-grammatical knowledge system, and comparative grammatical materials. The construction of the corpus content was guided by Stephen Krashen’s i+1 principle, the natural order of language acquisition, and the typological differences between Kazakh and English. Typical interference errors made by anglophones (at phonetic, lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic levels) were identified, and the ways in which these issues are addressed through corpus materials were demonstrated. The study employs comparative analysis, theoretical review, qualitative textual analysis, modelling, and methodological principles of corpus design. It offers a scientific rationale for selecting and structuring materials and presents a comprehensive system encompassing phonetic-graphical, lexical, grammatical, and linguistic-cultural levels. The Learner Corpus platform is aligned with the Turkic language teaching programmes currently being developed at the University of Oxford and is proposed as a prototype supplementary tool to be used from the 2026-2027 academic year. The article emphasizes that the emerging corpus database is the first universal, multi-level, and pedagogically structured digital resource tailored specifically to anglophones. Its theoretical significance lies in reinterpreting corpus-based approaches to teaching Kazakh and systematizing interference phenomena, while its practical value lies in its direct applicability in teaching practice, enabling individualized instruction and optimising workload distribution according to learners’ proficiency levels.

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