EFL Teacher’s Reflections towards the Use of Computerized Corpora As a Teaching Tool in Their Classrooms

Year 2015, , 85 - 104, 17.11.2014

Ali Özbay , M. Naci Kayaoğlu

https://doi.org/10.14812/cuefd.54367

Cited By: 6

Abstract

The relation between corpus based applications and language teaching in EFL context is far more obvious today, due to the potential of computerized corpus to offer new insights for the language teaching opportunities, which calls for efficient and technology literate language teachers. Although corpus and corpus tools attract a great deal of attention in research community, the use of corpora in EFL classrooms remains limited for various reasons. Part of the reason behind this picture may be due to unpopularity of corpus and corpus tools among the language teachers. Thus, the aim of this case study is to discuss ways of familiarizing language teachers with the potential benefits of the corpus tools and of increasing their perceptions towards it, since this will be an essential step towards the integration of these tools into the classroom environment. To this end, a case study with six (6) language teachers in an EFL context was carried out. Purposive sampling was used in the selection of the samples. Data on the perceptions expressed by the language teachers were collected through open ended interviews. The results suggest that almost all six teachers favored the language exploration process through a range of concordance searches on structural and lexical aspects of language but added that the potential of corpus to offer wide range of grammatical structures and lexical patterns at one time may be difficult to grasp for themselves as well as for their students in the classroom.

Keywords

Corpora, Perception, Teacher training

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