Arabic as a Language of Politics: A Case Study in Corpus-based Teaching

In Arabic studies, corpus linguistics is still a fledgling discipline, but it is bound to become an unavoidable tool for specialists who seek to ground their research in actual language use. This article presents the preliminary results of an on-going research on Arabic applied linguistics. It offers a first approach to the possibility of matching Arabic as a language of politics with corpus-based teaching. The paper briefly introduces the concept of corpus-based teaching, its advantages and potential limits. It then reviews the most important Arabic corpora currently available for the language of politics, by also describing their extension, features, and limitations. Finally, it suggests some classroom activities based on arabiCorpus.