A sample implementation of corpus integration through coursebook evaluation: Implications for language teacher education
Abstract
The use of corpora has an increased interest in language teaching in the past two decades. Many corpora have been utilized for several purposes in language classrooms directly or indirectly. In spite of the increasing awareness towards the use of corpora and the corpus tools, language teacher education programs still do not include corpus consultancy in their programs. This study aims to present a sample implementation of corpus integration in a language teacher education program at a large university in Turkey. The participants of the study are 21 senior pre-service English teachers enrolled in a fourth-grade course called Materials Adaptation and Evaluation. The task of coursebook evaluation was one of the requirements of the course. After training on the use of corpora for lexical awareness and corpus-informed coursebook evaluation, the participants evaluated local English coursebooks used in secondary schools in Turkey according to the frequency level of target words, vocabulary selection, presentation, and practice. The findings of the analysis of student teachers are discussed and analyzed to provide an example of corpus integration in language teacher education programs. Thus, this experience of student teachers might be of interest for teacher trainers and trainees to empower their research skills and to increase hands-on experiences on corpus use.Â
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