Integration of corpus literacy consultation into language teacher education: Course design, implementation, and evaluation

Abstract

This qualitative study presents a corpus literacy course designed and implemented at an undergraduate language teacher education program in Turkey, and its evaluation by pre-service ELT teachers. The course introduces the main concepts of corpus linguistics, raises future teachers’ linguistic and pedagogical awareness through corpus applications, and introduces them to corpus-informed practices to improve their pedagogical skills. In the first phase of the study, students’ corpus literacy levels were determined through a pre-course survey revealing that most of the participants did not know about corpora and their uses. The second and third phases were devoted to evaluating the course. Initially, student teachers were asked to write minute papers and reflection papers during the semester to evaluate the process. In the final phase, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were conducted after the course to explore their overall evaluations. Findings implied that corpus literacy integration into teacher education programs clearly yields positive outcomes, yet only one course is not enough to popularize it among EFL teachers.  Hence, extensive exposure to corpus literacy and curriculum-wide integration in the TEFL programs could contribute to its popularization among future practitioners.