A Corpus Linguistic Perspective on the Appropriateness of Pop Songs for Teaching Chinese as a Second Language

AbstractLanguage and music are closely related. Regarding the linguistic feature richness, pop songs are probably suitable to be used as extracurricular materials in language teaching. In order to prove this point, this paper presents the Contemporary Chinese Pop Lyrics (CCPL) corpus. Based on that, we investigated and evaluated the appropriateness of pop songs for Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL) with the assistance of Natural Language Processing methods from the perspective of Chinese character coverage, lexical coverage and the addressed topic similarity. Some suggestions in Chinese teaching with the aid of pop lyrics are provided.