VI. International Conference on Research in Applied Linguistics, Amasya, Turkey, 9 - 11 May 2022, pp.1
Abstract
This descriptive study’s objectives are two-fold: firstly, it aims at investigating the familiarity of Turkish EFL teachers with corpus linguistics; secondly, it seeks an answer to the question of whether they are using corpus resources in and out of the classroom or not. The data were collected from 201 in-service EFL teachers working in different parts of Turkey, 7 different regions and 55 cities, through an online survey designed by Callies (2019). The teachers worked at different school levels: primary school (N=27), secondary school (N=82), high school (N=73), and university (N=48).
The first part of the survey investigated the familiarity of teachers with corpus resources. The results revealed that 46.3% of the teachers heard about corpora during their undergraduate studies. While 40.8% of the teachers took classes in which corpus linguistics and English language corpora were (at least partially) covered, only 15.4% of them used corpus resources actively during their studies, e.g. to write term papers/dissertations. Secondly, it examined the corpus literacy integration into in-service teacher education. The results displayed that only 12.9% of the teachers heard about corpus linguistics and English corpora during their in-service education and solely 6.5% of them took classes teaching about English corpora and their uses in foreign language classrooms.
The second part of the survey firstly examined whether the teachers used corpus resources in and out of the classroom. The results indicated that only 22% (N=45) of the teachers use corpus resources during the teaching process. This part also explored the ways language teachers used corpus resources for teaching purposes. The results showed that the most common use of corpora was checking the acceptability of use when in doubt e.g. marking (68.9%).
The results of the study imply that Turkish EFL teachers’ familiarity with corpus resources and use is rather superficial. Although 40.8% of them took classes in which corpus resources were introduced during their studies, only 22% of them are using corpora in their classroom. It can be also inferred that to make the language teachers more familiar with corpus resources and their pedagogical uses, corpus linguistics should be integrated into in-service teacher education as the results point out that this is a lacking topic in in-service teacher education.
Keywords: corpus literacy, EFL teachers, in-service teacher education