The benefits of using corpora in language teaching

Make a guess: which of the following language skills can be improved using the corpus-based approach?

Contemporary research related to corpus linguistics

Since corpus linguistics became more popular, it has become an integral part of language research amongst linguists. This data-driven approach to studying language allows researchers to examine language patterns for different purposes. These linguistic data allow investigations into multifarious linguistic phenomena, including syntax, semantics, phonology, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and even stylistics. As such, corpus linguistics has been applied to diverse areas of study, including translational studies, sociolinguistics, and of course, its application to advance teaching practices. The use of corpora in linguistic research has revolutionised the field by providing researchers with access to vast amounts of authentic language data.

_{The momentum of publications about DDL over the past 30 years (Boulton & Vyatkina, 2021, p. 7)}

So, what are the benefits of using corpora?

Compared with traditional methods, adopting corpora in language classrooms offers the following benefits:

1. Rich authentic linguistic data
   • Concordancing tools will display linguistic data collected from different contexts. For instance, in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, texts from newspapers, academic journals, and academic books, TV drama and movie scripts, magazines, fiction, web contents, and blogs are collected to reflect the actual use of language. These databases may be updated non-regularly, and they enable us to observe the language used in a specific period of time according to our search preference.
2. Observing linguistic data in different registers
   • The linguistic data stored in concordancing websites may be categorised according to different registers. We can look up how people use a particular phrase or expression in the formal/informal context.
3. Learning collocations more easily
   • In most concordancing websites and anlaysis tools, searching for an instance of a particular word or phrase will allow us to know more about its surrounding words. This will facilitate the learning of collocations, and identifying recurring patterns or combinations in a given context.

What do teachers say about the method?

Do some light reading on the following excerpts from a study by Chen et al. (2019) and see how teachers react.

Teachers are willing to adopt corpora in language teaching

From the above study by Chen et al. (2019), it is shown that teachers are willing to apply corpus to improve their teaching practices. They generally showed great interest in their professional development after attending workshops that aimed at improving their competence to teach with corpora.

_{Teachers’ willingness to adopt corpus-based approach (DDL) into classroom practice (Image source: Crosthwaite & Schweinberger, 2021, p. 5)}

Therefore, it is not uncommon to see that, in other similar studies, such as Crosthwaite & Schweinberger (2021), most teachers are eager to adopt corpora after learning about them. Nonetheless, they could be held back by their skepticism, e.g. their doubt in young learners’ abilities to handle corpus or their own fear of acquiring corpus skills.

Research suggests that enhancing teachers’ corpus skills is essential to overcome their frustration or reluctance to employ corpus. Most teachers who have had training about corpus showed increased capacity to conduct corpus-based teaching, and that corpus tools are not as difficult to use as they thought to be!

In fact, corpus literacy (CL) plays a key role in shaping teachers’ competence.

Check out the next section to learn more about corpus literacy and begin your corpus training.