Abstract:

A corpus is as a representative collection of language that is selected according to explicit linguistic criteria, in order to be used for linguistic analyses. Over the past years, especially due to the radical technological advances, the field of Corpus Linguistics has been revolutionized; corpora cover a vast area of applications, and their contribution is highly appreciated in various fields. When considering the pedagogical applications of corpora, corpus use can enhance Data-driven Learning (DDL) and assist learners in facing various literacy demands. In this framework, inductive learning approaches are applied, since learners process examples of the target language, formulate hypotheses and test them for reaching the target rules through consciousness-raising in this learning process.

Our presentation aspires to offer language teachers suggestions on how to create effective learning conditions, describing the various stages and steps of corpus implementation in their teaching. The following research questions are addressed:
1) What is foreign language learners’ opinion about the in-class use of authentic corpus examples?
2) Do participants believe that corpus-based teaching material can contribute to the comprehension of grammatical structures and to vocabulary enrichment?
3) Which are the main advantages and the main difficulties of using corpora in the English language classroom, according to participants?
4) Have foreign language learners found the in-class use of corpora more beneficial compared to other teaching methods, in terms of grammar and vocabulary teaching?

The study presented has been conducted in a public, junior high-school in Greece, where English is taught as a foreign language. The authors delivered English language sessions on grammar and vocabulary through corpus-related tasks. At the end of the sessions, quantitative data were collected examining participants’ perspective towards corpus use in the English language course.

The corpora employed were the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. All examples used were derived from various genres (e.g. advertisements, newspapers, fiction/drama etc.). Participants received a number of handouts designed by the authors, which included: a range of exercises for practicing corpus-searching techniques, the processes involved in interpreting concordance output, and a number of tasks designed for in-class practice with corpus-based material. Data were collected after the completion of the corpus-based instruction using a questionnaire; SPSS was employed for the descriptive and inferential statistical analyses conducted. Findings suggest that students developed a positive attitude towards corpora, considered them helpful as a tool, yet they expressed their preference for using corpora in learning vocabulary than grammar.

The originality of this study lies in integrating corpora and corpus evidence in secondary education, and the EFL classroom of a junior high-school, aiming to cultivate learners’ information and critical literacy. It constitutes an innovative research project as it does not focus on students’ performance per se, but on exploring their perspective towards corpus-based methodology. Equally significant is that this corpus integration is attempted within the context of Greek secondary education, where corpora have not been extensively introduced.

Keywords:

Language teaching innovation, Corpus-based instruction, Data-driven learning, High-school, Greek context.