Corpus literacy instruction in language teacher education: Investigating Arab EFL student teachers’ immediate beliefs and long-term practices

Abstract

Abstract With the increasing recognition of the pedagogical applications of corpus linguistics, there has been a growing interest in developing teachers’ corpus literacy to popularize the use of corpora in language education. This longitudinal study investigated Arab Gulf EFL student teachers’ immediate and long-term responses to corpus literacy instruction. After teaching a corpus literacy component to two classes of student teachers in a graduate computer-assisted language learning course they attended, the author collected focus group data about their views on this instruction and their own expected future uses of corpora in language learning, teaching and research. Two years later, a group of these student teachers (n = 19) responded to a follow-up questionnaire exploring their beliefs about corpus literacy integration and their multiple uses of corpora. The student teachers reported very positive immediate and long-term perceptions of corpus literacy instruction, but it was found that such instruction has not brought about all the desired changes in their long-term uses of online corpora as a linguistic and pedagogical resource, or their attitudes towards doing corpus-based TESOL research. However, it is expected that the popularization benefits gained from corpus literacy integration could lead to better future developments in using corpora for language education and research purposes in the target context.