[Seminar]Development of student teachers’ corpus literacy&corpus-based language pedagogy via an online learning comunity

 Abstract 

Despite the efforts made by linguists and researchers, a corpus-based linguistic approach remains largely unknown to the majority of professional teaching community, particularly pre- and in-service teachers who largely rely on an intuition-based approach to solving language issues as well as developing pedagogical materials. In order to fill this gap and help teachers develop a corpus-based pedagogy, this study investigated how a group of pre-service language teachers develop their corpus literacy and corpus-based pedagogy via an online learning community. The training consists of four sessions: (1) a workshop that introduced basic concepts and search skills for corpus literacy, (2) online sessions that expose students to flipped videos and accompanying tutorial tasks, (3) online group task design, and (4) physical classroom-based presentation of the task design. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analysed, covering both the learning process and outcome of the student teachers. Regarding the learning process, a Likert-scale survey was used to collect student perceived effectiveness on their learning of corpus literacy and corpus-based pedagogy; focus-group interviews were conducted to probe into more in-depth qualitative perspectives. As for the learning outcome, a set of self-developed rubrics were developed to rate the quality of each group task design. The results show that such a corpus-based training enhanced by online learning is effective in providing an adequate corpus literacy for our pre-service teachers, and allows them to further develop corpus-based knowledge and skills to design appropriate learning and teaching materials. 

Qing Ma is the Assistant Professor of Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. She obtained PhD in Linguistics, University of Louvain, Belgium. She is the committee member of Hong Kong Association for Applied Linguistics (HAAL) as wells the China Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ChinaCALL). Her main research interests include L2 vocabulary acquisition, corpus linguistics, computer assisted language learning (CALL), and mobile assisted language learning (MALL).