Corpus literacy instruction in language teacher education: Investigating Arab EFL student teachers’ immediate beliefs and long-term practices

Abstract

With the increasing recognition of the pedagogical applications of corpus linguistics, there has been a growing interest in developing teachers’ corpus literacy to popularize the use of corpora in language education. This longitudinal study investigated Arab Gulf EFL student teachers’ immediate and long-term responses to corpus literacy instruction. After teaching a corpus literacy component to two classes of student teachers in a graduate computer-assisted language learning course they attended, the author collected focus group data about their views on this instruction and their own expected future uses of corpora in language learning, teaching and research. Two years later, a group of these student teachers (n = 19) responded to a follow-up questionnaire exploring their beliefs about corpus literacy integration and their multiple uses of corpora. The student teachers reported very positive immediate and long-term perceptions of corpus literacy instruction, but it was found that such instruction has not brought about all the desired changes in their long-term uses of online corpora as a linguistic and pedagogical resource, or their attitudes towards doing corpus-based TESOL research. However, it is expected that the popularization benefits gained from corpus literacy integration could lead to better future developments in using corpora for language education and research purposes in the target context.

An online training course on the use of corpora for teachers in public schools

“…Other studies offered training courses but were aimed at investigating how teachers acquired corpus literacy (Heather & Helt, 2012;Abdel Latif, 2020). Heather and Helt (2012) investigated how six pre-service teachers acquired corpus literacy during a grammar course that was offered to 52 students on campus.…”

Walking the Walk? (Mis)alignment of EFL Teachers' Self‐Reported Corpus Literacy Skills and Their Competence in Planning and Implementing Corpus‐Based Language Pedagogy

“…Several studies have sought to train pre-and in-service language teacher trainees in the fundamentals of corpus literacy (e.g., Heather and Helt, 2012;Le nko-Szyma nska, 2014;Zareva, 2016;Latif, 2021;Ma et al, 2022, Schmidt, 2022Bennett and Dhonnchadha, 2023). Heather and Helt (2012) adopted a case study methodology to analyze the progress of six preservice language teachers in developing various aspects of corpus literacy throughout a semester-long introductory grammar course that incorporated corpus linguistics, with generally successful results.…”

“…While the trainees in Bennett and Dhonnchadha's (2023) signaled their intention to use corpora in future practice, there is no evidence they did so and their reported complaints about the complexity of the corpus tool used (COCA) may have ultimately reduced any future uptake. Latif (2021) conducted corpus literacy training in the Saudi Arabian EFL context, finding that despite initial enthusiasm about CBLP in the short-term following training, trainees were found to be reluctant to adopt CBLP in a follow-up survey conducted 2 years later. Xodabande and Nazari (2022) maintain a link between improved corpus literacy and future CBLP practice in their study in the Iranian context, but this study is comprised of only six participants.…”

“…Typically focusing on pre-or in-service language teachers taking teacher education degrees or courses on computerassisted language learning, methods for training teachers in DDL have included the completion of off-or online training resources (e.g., Crosthwaite, 2020;Schmidt, 2022) covering essential corpus query skills, combined with in-person workshops led by applied linguists and the analysis of trainee-created lesson plans containing corpus-based activities. Such interventions are an essential part of corpora and DDL finally entering pretertiary language classrooms with more frequency and are accompanied by (generally) positive perceptions of such training as (self-)reported by participants (Le nko-Szyma nska, 2014;Zareva, 2016;Latif, 2021;Bennett and Dhonnchadha, 2023). However, it is perhaps time to consider more carefully the nature of the skills covered in these corpus training sessions, the pedagogical approaches espoused within them, and the assessment of the corpus literacy that is claimed to be acquired as a result.…”

Short Teacher Responses in the EFL Classroom: A Corpus-Approach Assessment

“…The Corpus Approach can help us answer some questions related to Classroom English and equip NNESTs with a valuable tool to enhance their CIC. In general, the issue of pedagogical applications of corpus linguistics and developing teachers' corpus literacy in language education has been repeatedly addressed (Abdel Latif, 2021).…”