Corpora in English Language Teacher Education: Research, Integration, and Resources

Abstract

For some time, arguments have been made that for the increased successful use of corpus linguistics (CL), in the form of Data‐Driven Learning (DDL; Johns, 1991) in the second language classroom, teacher education programs must play a central role by providing the necessary instruction and triggers. Three means of integrating corpora into teacher education have been identified (Leńko‐Szymańska, 2022): as a tool for language awareness, as pedagogically‐focussed instruction for DDL, and as a fully‐fledged CL course. It is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of these three approaches because we can only rely on the relatively few, but growing, number of research studies that are published. Naturally, the existing studies are based on relatively small numbers of participants, rely mainly on data collected through questionnaires and self‐reports, and rarely trace the extended effects of the instruction after the student teachers leave the programs. It is also hard to generalize from these accounts as they are deeply imbedded in their institutional curricula and their local teacher education traditions. Nonetheless, they provide a foundation for the discussion in this paper which proposes a tripartite framework for the integration of instructional CL into language teacher education programs. This consists of corpus literacies, corpus‐based language pedagogy, and corpus‐based reflective practice. In addition, we present a summary of some useful published resources that can be used to support the integration of such a framework.

Corpus Linguistics in Second Language Teacher Education

“…Even though the number of published accounts of integrating corpora in teacher education has been steadily increasing in the last 15 years (see Farr and Riordan, this issue, for an overview), such integration remains scarce, and/or is not always fully effective. The literature demonstrates that this integration can take different forms (Farr, 2022;Farr & Leńko-Szymańska 2023;Leńko-Szymańska 2022;Ma, Chiu, Lin, & Mendoza, 2023). Most frequently, student teachers are exposed to corpora in their language development or language awareness classes.…”

“…Leńko-Szymańska (2017; proposed that student teachers need to develop three kinds of skills to ensure future positive integration of corpora: purely technical skills, which involve familiarity with different types of software and their functionalities, cognitive or corpus linguistic skills, which allow teachers to identify interesting language points, writing appropriate queries and interpreting their results; and, finally, students need to develop appropriate pedagogic skills in order to create suitable and diverse materials and tasks which are pertinent to their lesson aims and course objectives. Farr and Leńko-Szymańska (2023) recently proposed a more holistic framework for corpus integration across various curricula in teacher education programmes, consisting of three important components:…”