[Webinar] Corpus Technology for Language Teachers in Action: Theory and Practice

Link to the Zoom meeting:

https://hkbu.zoom.us/j/94751747370

Meeting ID: 947 5174 7370

Since the 1980s, corpora have been widely used in all areas of language studies and have greatly advanced our understanding of language use and patterns. Through the use of corpora, it is widely believed that language learners could become autonomous learners without the “middleman” - language teachers (Johns, 1990). Despite the encouraging evidence generated from experimental studies conducted by corpus linguists or specialists, the role of corpora in ordinary language teachers’ classroom teaching remains minimal (Boulton, 2017; Callies, 2019; Chambers, 2019). It is argued in this seminar that the “middleman” (language teachers) cannot be bypassed if corpora shall be integrated into mainstream classroom teaching to benefit a wide population of language learners.

In this seminar, a new corpus-based language pedagogy (CBLP) will be introduced. Shulman’s (1986, 1987) pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is a useful concept to understand CBLP which blends corpus linguistics with language pedagogy. Based on a differentiation of corpus literacy (Mukherjee, 2006; Heather & Helt, 2012) and CBLP, a two-step corpus training model is created to equip teachers/student teachers with the necessary knowledge and skills for integrating corpora into their classroom teaching. This is followed by brief reports of two case studies of the CBLP development of pre-service teachers (Ma et al., 2021) and in-service teachers (Ma et al., 2022). In addition, a dedicated website (CAP) showcasing rich CBLP resources will be introduced as an online platform to facilitate teachers and student teachers’ self-learning of CBLP. Finally, future directions for CBLP research and practice will be suggested.

Qing Ma is an associate professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. Her main research interests include second language vocabulary acquisition, corpus linguistics, corpus-based language pedagogy (CBLP), computer assisted language learning (CALL) and mobile assisted language learning (MALL).

She has developed the Parallel EAP Corpora (http://corpus.eduhk.hk/eap/) for research purposes and the Corpus-Aided Platform for Language Teachers (CAP) (http://corpus.eduhk.hk/cap/) for teacher training. She is an experimenter of corpus technology in teaching, and passionate English teacher trainer. Recently, she has established a new corpus-based language pedagogy by theorising and empirically testing it that has positively impacted many pre-service and in-service English teachers. She is the associate editor for two journals: International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching (IJCALLT); The Journal of China Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ChinaCALL).