Using Language Corpora in Initial Teacher Education: Pedagogic Issues and Practical Applications

Abstract

The vast increase in the number of corpus‐based materials, such as dictionaries and grammars, attests to the importance of corpus linguistics to English language description. Developments are also evident in the use of corpora in the classroom in data‐driven learning (Johns, 1991). These rapid developments in the use of language‐related technology have not been matched by updated practices in teacher education. This article makes a case for the inclusion of corpus linguistics in initial language teacher education to enhance teachers' research skills and language awareness. The authors offer examples of corpus‐based tasks for increasing students' understanding of word classes, register‐related grammatical choices, and socioculturally conditioned grammatical choices. Practical considerations for the integration of language corpora in a teacher education program are outlined.

Evaluating the Use of Corpus-based Instruction in a Language Teacher Education Context: Perspectives from the Users

“…In an earlier article, we have outlined various definitions of corpus linguistics and some of the important considerations to take into account when considering their potential applications (O'Keeffe & Farr, 2003), and so I will not repeat these issues in detail here, but summarise and expand on those most relevant. Corpus linguistics is an approach (for a discussion of the methodological status of CL, see Tognini-Bonelli, 2001) which can be, and has been, used in many disciplines, for example, dialectology, lexicography, sociolinguistics, language materials development, language therapies, speech technology, forensic linguistics, literary studies, language change and evolution, and grammar research.…”

Language teachers with corpora in mind: from starting steps to walking tall

“…In this section, we have touched on two important issues, and while the present paper does not allow for an extended discussion of either, they have both been given more detailed coverage in previous publications (see O'Keeffe and Farr 2003;McEnery, Xiao and Tono 2006). Firstly, there is the question of how many examples are required to allow a corpus user to generalise from the results.…”

“…On the other hand, smaller corpora will produce more manageable results for students and teachers to work with, as well as providing opportunities for accessing the original files to provide more context. Arguments have been made for students to initially experience corpus linguistics through smaller corpora as a sort of training forum during which their conceptual schema can adapt in preparation for using larger corpora (Gavioli and Aston 2001;O'Keeffe and Farr 2003).…”

Spoken Grammar in L2 Classrooms: 'I Mean in the Corpus

“…Research on the differences between the use of language in social life and its formal description has supplied enough evidence to claim that L2 learners need more than correct sentences (Geoffrey, L., 2000;Keeffe, A. and F. Farr, 2003;McCarthy, M. and R. Carter, 2001). By investigating how often features of spoken grammar such as ellipsis, left dislocation, topical information, reinforcement the tail slot and indirect speech occur which could be regarded as unlikely to occur in the written text but which do not seem wrong or ill-formed and occurred repeatedly in mini-corpora, Carter and McCarthy (1995) argue that descriptions relying on the written texts or on restricted genres and registers of spoken language are likely to exclude various features within everyday informal grammar and usage.…”