What is corpus literacy (CL) and why is it important?
One key element of adopting the corpus-based approach in language teaching is corpus literacy (CL). As part of the content knowledge base for the approach, the concept of CL first came around in 2004, when Mukherjee surveyed some English language teachers in Germany. It was found that, although teachers were enthusiastic about harnessing corpus resources to teach, they were sceptical about enacting them in reality. Subsequent research concluded that the gap between teachers’ actual implementation of corpus-based teaching and their reluctance is the absence of a sound and solid foundation of corpus literacy.
In 2012, Heather and Helt defined corpus literacy as “the ability to use the technology of corpus linguistics to investigate language and enhance the language development of students” (p. 417). It was later generally acknowledged that corpus literacy entails the following basic components:
- Understanding the basic concepts in corpus linguistics
- Searching corpora and analysing corpus data by means of corpus software tools, e.g. concordancers
- Interpreting corpus data
- Using corpus output to generate teaching materials and activities
Callies (2016) also attempted to further break down the concept and added that abilities such as selecting appropriate corpora, retrieving and processing data (such as how to search, sort, and inspect), and interpreting and describing findings from a corpus are some of the extra techniques conducive to quality corpus-based teaching.
Ready to go!
So far, we have covered what corpus linguistics is, some brief history of its popularisation, and its applications in language research and education. In fact, what you have been doing is already part of the journey to develop your corpus literacy – at least the first component shown in the above figure.
In the next section, we will cover 20 basic metalinguistic terms related to corpus and its applications. This will help you understand the next few modules better, where you will be guided to perform hands-on activities on corpus concordancing websites and software.