Corpus literacy development: Three teachers' stories

Abstract

Corpus and applied linguists have reported on the benefits that teachers gain from teaching with language corpora as early as the 1990s; however, recent studies confirm that few teachers use corpora in their classrooms. In attempts to change this reality, some researchers have called for corpus literacy training programmes to guide teachers in using corpora/corpus tools to design their typical classroom tasks. A training programme was built around this idea. This paper outlines three teachers’ corpus literacy development during the training programme: a teacher with previous experience teaching with corpora, a teacher with knowledge of but no experience teaching with corpora, and a teacher who reported no knowledge or prior experience teaching with corpora. To provide an in-depth perspective, a qualitative thematic analysis was completed with themes emerging from the dataset. Findings show that teachers viewed the training positively, that they incorporated corpus-based materials in their classes, and that they were using corpora in their teaching three months following the programme. Further research is called for which highlights teachers’ voices in their corpus literacy development.