Training teachers in data driven learning: Tackling the challenge

Abstract

The aim of this article is to assess the effectiveness of a semester-long pre-service teacher-training course on the use of corpora in language learning and teaching. This is achieved by an analysis of 53 corpus-based projects prepared by the participants. First, the aims and the design of the course are briefly presented. The main section of the article examines the trainees’ projects, which involved compiling small English for specific purposes corpora, analysing them and preparing corpus-based lessons. Specifically, the topics of the projects, the corpora that the participants built, the types of the analyses conducted, and the corpus-informed and corpus-based activities created by the trainees are examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. The projects’ outcomes reveal that the competencies developed by the pre-service teachers during the course were not sufficient. The participants seemed to have mastered only the basic technical skills of manipulating corpora, and they lacked autonomy in corpus-linguistic skills and pedagogical skills which were necessary for successful exploitations of corpora in language education. This observation—supported by earlier research—calls for the development and empirical validation of a model of effective teacher training in corpus-informed and corpus-based instruction.