Chapter published in:
Learner Corpora and Language Teaching
Edited by Sandra Götz and Joybrato Mukherjee
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 92] 2019
► pp. 245–264

Integrating corpus literacy into language teacher education

The case of learner corpora

| University of Bremen
Despite the increasing popularization and availability of corpus tools and resources, the practice of English language teaching still seems to be only marginally affected by the corpus-linguistic turn, because comparatively few teachers were trained in corpus linguistics and use corpora or corpus software regularly themselves (Mukherjee 2004; Römer 2011). This chapter first reports on a recent survey that updates and largely confirms Mukherjee’s (2004) findings. It is argued that while university students of modern languages are increasingly familiarized with the research-based use of corpora in linguistic content classes, this research perspective is not sufficiently translated into a teaching perspective for corpora to be considered a useful addition to the toolbox of language teachers. The chapter then reports on the integration of corpus linguistics into the curriculum for English language teacher students by exposing them to the use of corpora and corpus methods from a researcher’s, teacher’s and learner’s perspective.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus literacy
  • 3.Survey data: Updating Mukherjee (2004)
  • 4.Corpus linguistics in the curriculum for language teacher students: An example with learner corpora
    • 4.1Background
    • 4.2The corpus material – The added value of learner corpora
    • 4.3Activity on the acquisition of intensifying adverbs
    • 4.4Follow-up activities
  • 5.Conclusions and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 06 May 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.92.12cal
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