A Qualitative Approach to Using Corpora in Teacher Education

Abstract

This article is concerned with the applied use of corpora for student teachers, drawing on qualitative methods. A study is presented in which a group of future language instructors are invited to elaborate on a project investigating the impact of awareness-raising on lesson planning. Working on a spoken corpus, Narrative Inquiry is used as a means to engage with the data, looking at different types of affordance, i.e., individual experiences and outcomes. Corpus extracts illustrating these affordances then form the basis for the awareness-raising activity. This activity is completed by another group of student teachers, who go on to answer questions in an online task concerned with pedagogical content knowledge choices. It is shown how the awareness-raising activity impacts choices, opinions and teaching objectives, leading to increased learner-centredness and an overall sense of empathy and engagement. Negative affordances appear to attract particular attention, providing most changes in stance as participants embrace potential difficulties and individual challenges in their lesson planning.