THE EDUCATIONAL CORPUS OF THE RNC AS VALUABLE RESOURCE FOR EDUCATORS

The Russian educational corpus is primarily intended for school lessons of the Russianlanguage and literature. It can also be used in university teaching as well as for teaching Russian as a foreign language and for training language teachers. The Educational corpus is based on other principles that distinguish it from the Main corpus of written texts. The diff erences relate to the balance of texts in the corpus, their compliance with the school curriculum and modern spelling standards.
The volume of the corpus exceeds 13 million word usage. The main part of the corpus is made up of works included in the literature curriculum for secondary and high school, including those recommended for extracurricular reading. Non-fi ction texts included in the corpus belong to the functional styles that are studied in the course of the Russian
language (journalistic, offi cial, educational, academic and colloquial styles). The morphological markup in the Educational corpus is adapted to the standard Russian language manuals and provides the traditional, simplifi ed grammatical analysis. In addition, in order to comply with the purposes of school teaching, additional morphological features were introduced into the annotation scheme: infl ectional types of nouns and verbs (declension, conjugation) and lexical and grammatical categories of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs. Morphological markup has been performed automatically in the texts of the Educational corpus using a special program, while grammatical homonyms have been disambiguated. A small part of the texts of the Educational corpus are manually disambiguated.
The new markup makes available all the latest functionality. First of all, these are new types of search results (Graph by year, Statistics, Frequency, N-grams), new types of search query (Collocation Search), as well as a new analytical tool — Word at a Glance which includes Word Sketches and Similar Words widgets, etc. These tools are designed to increase the attractiveness of the corpus for the user and turn it into a necessary tool for a language and literature teacher.