Is this enough? A qualitative evaluation of the effectiveness of a teacher-training course on the use of corpora in language education

Abstract

AbstractThe paper describes a teacher-training course on the use of corpora in language education offered to graduate students at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw. It also presents the results of two questionnaires distributed to the students prior to and after the second edition of the course. The main aims of the course are: to introduce students to the concept of a corpus and its analysis; to familiarize them with a range of available corpora, corpus-based resources and tools; and to demonstrate to them various applications of corpora in language education, with special emphasis placed on the in-house preparation of courses, teaching materials and class activities. In the first part of the paper, the design, the syllabus, the progression and the outcomes of the course are outlined. In the second part, the responses of thirteen students who participated in the second edition of the course are analysed. The analysis indicates that on the whole the students reacted positively to the course and they saw the benefits of corpus-based materials and tools in language teaching. Yet the students also reported that they needed more time to gain full command of the resources and software presented and more guidance on the pedagogical issues related to corpus use. The paper concludes that fourteen sessions, designed as an overview of the whole range of corpus-based resources and applications, is not sufficient to encourage teacher trainees to use corpora in their future work if they have no contact with these resources and tools in other classes. Only extensive exposure to corpora by future teachers coupled with suitable teacher training in the applications of corpora in language education may bring a substantial change in the scope of corpus use in language classrooms in the wide educational context.