Hands-on Practices on the Use of Corpora in English Language Teaching: Reflections from Teacher Training

Abstract

Along with recent advances in the development of corpus tools, there has been a growing interest in integrating corpora into language teaching. However, teachers’ lack of awareness may be an obstacle to the effective implementation of corpora in language classroom routines. This study offers an in-service training program on corpus use in language pedagogy and aims to investigate teachers’ views on corpus-based teaching and learning regarding their actual hands-on experiences. For this purpose, 10 EFL instructors at a state university in Turkey were enrolled in an intensive seven-week training program. This program involved a total of nine sessions aimed at presenting how to use corpus tools in language teaching and implementing corpus-based activities in vocabulary teaching, grammar teaching, and error correction. Data were collected via reflective logs and semi-structured interviews. Qualitative analyses revealed the importance of providing teachers with in-service training on corpus use since they perceived to gain awareness, knowledge, and skills required for implementing pedagogical applications of corpora in language teaching while also reporting drawbacks of corpus use in practice. The findings of the study shed light on future practices related to pedagogical uses of corpora in language classrooms and offer a number of implications for teacher education.