Norwegian in-service teachers’ perspectives on language corpora in teaching English

Abstract

This study aims to explore potential reasons why the use of the tools and methods of corpus linguistics are not prevalent in English teaching in Norway, using the research question What do in-service English teachers in Norway find useful about corpora and what do they find challenging? The study provides interview data from in-service teachers, contributing to our understanding of the in-service perspective on corpora. The research design consists of teaching corpus use in seminars for in-service English teachers (featuring LancsLex, the concordancer AntConc and the OANC), integrated into a language course that is part of a further education programme, and semi-structured interviews with four of the students who took the course, during which they also interacted with Netspeak, SKELL and COCA. As with previous research, the in-service teachers found corpora particularly useful for teaching and learning vocabulary, and found challenges to use which are categorized here as usability (criticism of AntConc), IT challenges (a lack of IT skills among teachers), learner-corpus interaction challenges (the complexity of software and concordance lines for pupils; pupil uninterest in language), and lack of teacher need (mistakes being “obvious” to teachers in the lower years). The article discusses some implications of these findings.
 Keywords: English language teaching, pedagogical corpus application, corpora 
 
 

Corpus Literacy Training for In-Service English Language Teachers

“…Earlier studies on implementing corpora into classroom practices (Breyer, 2009;Chambers et al, 2011;Leńko-Szymańska, 2014) illustrate that teachers who were instructed explicitly in their use and encouraged to apply what they learned become highly skilled in using corpora to manage their instruction and make appropriate language teaching decisions. Although researchers have also investigated corpus literacy for in-service language teachers (Çalışkan & Kuru Gönen, 2018;Chen et al, 2019;Karlsen & Monsen, 2020;Kavanagh, 2021;Lin & Lee, 2015;Ma et al, 2022;Mukherjee, 2004), there is still a need for further research. In previous studies, for example, Karlsen and Monsen (2020) interviewed four upper secondary school teachers to learn about their perspectives on integrating corpora in their teaching.…”

“…The authors recommended the development of pedagogically appropriate and freely accessible corpora for use in class. Kavanagh (2021) investigated what four in-service English teachers found useful or challenging in corpora and found that they reported the same challenges, which the researcher considered a positive finding because "if the same problems exist for every type of teacher, successful solutions may apply to all" (p. 101). In-service teachers' positive attitudes toward corpus use in their classes were found among teachers with different amounts of teaching experiences; for example, Lin and Lee's (2015) study involved early career teachers, while Bunting's (2013) study involved teachers with more than 20 years of experience.…”

The Effectiveness Data-Driven Vocabulary Learning: Hands-on Concordancing through a Pedagogical Corpus

“…This could be one of the reasons as to why corpora use has not been normalized in language teaching and learning, and research-practice gap still exists (Chambers, 2019). To bridge this gap, the creation of a contextually relevant pedagogical corpus (as suggested by Braun, 2005) emerges as a potential solution, particularly in addressing challenges associated with the application of general corpora, especially in terms of learner-corpus interaction complexities (Kavanagh, 2021). Especially promising for learners at lower proficiency levels, who primarily engage with classroom language and struggle to comprehend less common vocabulary within native corpora, a pedagogical corpus offers the potential to amplify benefits.…”