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Crossing Boundaries through Corpora: Innovative corpus approaches within and beyond linguistics
Edited by Sarah Buschfeld, Patricia Ronan, Theresa Neumaier, Andreas Weilinghoff and Lisa Westermayer
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 119] 2024
► pp. 217–245

Chapter 9
Do corpus data on World Englishes inspire tolerance of variation in ELT professionals?

An experimental questionnaire study with native English speaking teachers

| University of Bamberg,
The present study aims to show that — given the status of English as a pluricentric global language and as a lingua franca — Corpus Linguistics has important and unique contributions to make to English Language Teaching (ELT). Desirable innovations arguably involve popularizing the use of corpus concordancing as a tool to put native speaker intuitions on a firmer empirical footing, and imbuing ELT practitioners with an awareness that variation – in particular (but not only) between geographical varieties — is an inherent and legitimate characteristic of language in use. To support these points, a quasi-experimental questionnaire study with 76 native English speaking teachers based at German universities is reported, which demonstrates the promises but also the obstacles of such an approach.
Keywords: English as an International Language (EIL), English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), World Englishes, English Language Teaching (ELT), Varieties of English, Data-driven learning (DDL), Corpus-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), Prepositional phrases, applications of corpus linguistics, corpus literacy, error correction, Native English Speaking Teachers (NESTs), target norm, consistency, bias
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Researching and teaching English as an international language
  • 2.Overview: Corpora in English language teaching
  • 3.Study design: Acceptability ratings pre and post exposure to corpus evidence
  • 4.Results: Foreseeable matches and unforeseen mismatches
  • 5.Discussion: Corpus-linguistic and teaching perspectives
  • 6.Conclusion: The need for a corpus toolkit in ELT
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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