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.