‘Opening up’ Corpus Linguistics
An Open Education Approach to Developing Corpus Literacy among Pre-service Language Teachers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/slte.25371Keywords:
data-driven learning (DDL), corpus-based language pedagogy, materials design, open educational resources (OER), OER-enabled pedagogy, teacher education, English language teaching (ELT)Abstract
Despite a multitude of empirical studies pointing to the benefits of integrating corpora in second language (L2) teaching and learning, corpus use in the pre-tertiary L2 classroom remains the exception rather than the norm. This much-discussed research-practice gap can be attributed to the limited physical, intellectual and social accessibility of both corpus research and corpus resources. To address this issue, I explore the potential of Open Education in a course aimed at imparting corpus literacy to pre-service EFL teachers. I present the design of a course focused on the collaborative creation of a new Open Educational Resource (OER): a guide to creating corpus-informed teaching materials. The present study evaluates the effectiveness of three iterations of this course in enhancing the physical, intellectual, and social accessibility of corpus linguistics for L2 education. Analyses of pre- and post-course surveys, students’ OER chapter submissions, and reflection statements show that the semester-long course successfully developed participants’ technical and pedagogical corpus literacy. The findings suggest that the adoption of OER-enabled pedagogy in an initial teacher education course can make a positive contribution to bridging the corpus research-teaching gap.
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