Hi, today I'm going to be telling you
about a corpus linguistics seminar which
I developed and evaluated at Osnabrück University and which in fact I had
the pleasure of teaching in this very
building last semester.
Before I start, just to let you know the slides are available for download.
So why design a  corpus linguistics seminar in pre-service teacher training?
Well, evidently the large gap that was
identified back in 2004 between the
wealth of applied corpus linguistics
research and teaching practice still
exists and that's still very much the case
at least in Germany and, in particular,
in the school EFL context. The need to
convince practicing teachers to use
corpora and concordances in the classroom that was identified by Römer back in 2006
is still one that remains very much valid.
To address these issues, the centrality
of teacher training has been pointed out
time and time again.
This was a project-based seminar designed for master students training to become
English teachers which really focuses on
language teachers needs.
The institutional constraints were the
following: I had 13 weekly sessions,
that's one semester at German university
and each session lasts 90 minutes.
Usually there are something between 30
to 40 students and this was happening at
Osnabrück, which is in Lower Saxony,
where the wheel is on the map.
The students are training to become English teachers for primary, secondary and vocational schools.
The learning objectives were really focused on
understanding the value of using corpora
in the classroom and on being able to
use a range of tools and methods in an
autonomous manner.
The focus was on designing corpus-informed materials as the practical use of
corpora in the classroom and
understanding how to integrate corpus
work in the curriculum and in lesson
plans.
A further aim was to enable students to
become multipliers and to be able to
teach others
how to use corpora in the classroom.
The seminar was designed a project-based
seminar with the aim of publishing a
practical guide to using corpora for EFL
teachers and this is a guide that's to
be published online open access so that
teachers from across the world
can use it draw inspiration from it and
learn how to use corpora for their own
classroom practice. The process was the
following: we looked at the basics of
corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics
was new to the vast majority of students,
so we looked at different types of
corpora different methods and different
tools and what we also really focused on
the needs of teachers within the classroom
so they will need to be able to create
material, to assess students, to give
feedback and so on and so forth. Then we
looked at how these needs could be met
using course linguistic methods. 
Finally, students developed their own resources
they worked on a chapter of the guide to
be published and students gave each
other feedback on that project
and on the chapter drafts; they helped
each other to improve their work and to
work towards a common publication.
In practice, the process was the following: I
started with an introduction to
corpus linguistics, to various corpus
tools and methods. We then looked at
material design and task design using
some of these corpus tools and then
about halfway through the semester
students presented their ideas to each
other in a very short pitch presentation
and we discussed these ideas.
In the next phase, students worked to improve the ideas, to continue to develop them,
always taking a problem-solving approach.
Then we reached the stage where
they all had a chapter draft and at the
end of the semester students peer
reviewed each other's chapters and gave
each other feedback.
the schedule was the following but I won't go into details for now
I will move on to the course evaluation: This was done with a pre-course survey and a post-course survey
which I conducted using the 
interface sosci.de. I also looked at the
results of the official university
course evaluation and at the projects
that the students
produced themselves so that was the co-author
chapters and also their individual self
reflection statements.
Starting with the pre-course survey and the reasons for choosing the course
students were very keen to find out about new methods of teaching English as a foreign language
and about two-thirds were interested in
finding out more about corpora and corpus linguistics.
The survey enabled me
to find out about their previous
knowledge and 80% of students said that
they have no idea what corpus linguistics
was about when they started
the course. In a minute I will show you
some examples of students' work, so these
are chapters to be published in the online guide.
Here are some of the
considerations that I gave students when
working on their ideas. So it was
important to have clear learning objectives
for the learners but also to
meet specific teacher needs by
constructing these materials. The
chapters themselves needed to have very
clear easy-to-follow instructions and so
many of them opted for screenshots for
arrows and for bullet point lists of
instructions. It was important that they
took into consideration constraints such
as time and resources, access the
software, so as to ensure that other
teachers would genuinely be able to
follow their instructions to create
their own materials and it was important
that they go beyond simply creating a
word list or set of collocations but
really integrate those in tasks and
lessons. So here's an example from Sarah
and Diana if you're training to become
English teachers at primary school level.
They looked at the topic of breakfast
and came up with a list of collocations and phrases
around the topic of breakfast using the Spoken BNC2014 on CQPweb
and then they designed tasks for learners
to acquire these phrases and idioms.
Selke is training to become a teacher
at secondary school level and she was interested in the topic of invitations.
To do that, she looked at the Corpus
of American Soap Operas on english-corpora.org
and her lesson is paper-based
data-driven learning.
In Germany, teachers usually teach two subjects in schools and Isabelle's second subject is
mathematics. She was interested to see
how maths could be taught in bilingual
settings and, in Germany, that's usually
taught that in English. To do that, she
compiled a corpus of maths tutorials from
YouTube and used that data to extract
collocations and phrases around the
topic of fractions and created a lesson
that encourages students to create their
own podcast or videos to teach fractions to other students.
Simone is training to become an English teacher
at vocational schools and her second
subject is nursing. Now, it's quite difficult
to access data on hospital interactions
and so she decided to build and exploit
a corpus of the TV series
Grey's Anatomy to do just that.
And finally just one more example, but there are many more that I could present,
this is by Cara who's also training for vocational schools. She actually created a virtual
corpus based on the Wikipedia corpus on
english-corpora.org to create a word
list of adjectives that can be used to
describe skin and then she creates a
lesson that will help students to describe a patient's skin in order to find the right treatment.
The course is rated as very interesting and relevant
and the subjective learning success was
relatively high. The students also rated
the quality of their final projects as
"very high". I was interested in particular
to look at the level of difficulty how
that was perceived by the students and
indeed about half the students said it
was "high", too high.
whereas only half said it was "average". The scope of the course was also seen to be
too high by a quarter of the students
and similarly the pace of the course was
judged by some students to be too high.
So these are things to take into
consideration for future developments.
The post-course survey obviously shows
that students now know what course
linguistics is about. The majority
consider corpus linguistics to be useful
for language teachers but, at the same time,
we can see that 30% of students
agreed that they will probably never use
corpora again and 35 percent agreed that
data-driven learning does not suit many
language learners. Equally we find that
about the students think that using
corpora in the English classroom is very
difficult and that creating corpus-informed
materials is too time-consuming so
this shows really mixed results.
For some students it was a very positive
experience and they created great
projects, but is it going to be sustainable?
Well, seemingly not for all students.
The self-reflection statements
were interesting to find out what
exactly was going on. One common
theme is: too many resources,
too many corpora available.
One particular issue we had is that I tried
to introduce students to AntConc and
LancsBox, but this was very difficult
because we had problems installing the
software on many students' computers and
in the end, we ended up giving up and
going back to web-based interfaces.
But this was a lot of frustration on for
students and something to avoid in the future.
Here's a longer student
reflection which summarises quite well
what was going on in particular for
primary school teachers or future
primary school teachers. This particular
student is not convinced that corpora
are going to be useful for her as a
future primary school teacher, but she
found it useful for her own language
learning process.
So what are the main takeaway messages?
The first thing is: less is more.
That means fewer tools, fewer resources,
fewer corpora introduced in the sessions.
In terms of tools, web-based only will be
my choice in future
because I simply don't have time to do
one-to-one technical support on a weekly
basis and it's just very frustrating for
students who have computers on
which they simply can't install the latest
software. I've also started creating
short video tutorials on basic corpus
functions because I found that even if
I've demonstrated and the students have
tried out a function in class, a few
weeks later, they're unsure as to where
to click and what exactly it is they
need to do and in future I'd like to
focus more on materials design and less on
course linguistics. It's also I think
important to have more examples of good
corpus-informed materials for students to
get a better idea of what's possible.
For many, there are so many options and so many possibilities that this actually
hampered their creativity more than it
helped.
So what's next? Well, the best chapter
from this seminar are going to
be published in an Open Education
Resource which will be available online.
We're currently working to revise them,
edit them, and format them and some the
students who wrote the chapters are
involved in that process. At the same
time, I have developed and am currently
teaching a new seminar called Designing and Evaluating Materials for Language Teaching.
This is designing corpus-informed materials 
but you can see that the
focus is moving away from an overt focus
on course linguistics and more on
materials design. I'll be able to tell
you whether this has been more or less
successful very soon. Due to the current
situation, this was an online course but
actually that's worked rather well since
I was already working on making a short
video tutorials so it's been a mixture of
asynchronous and synchronous elements.
If you'd like to be updated as to
the publication of our guide then just
send me an email: you can use the QR code to send me that email and I'll let you
know once we're so that far but we're
currently working on six chapters which
should be ready fairly soon.
If you've got any questions or
comments about this current seminar or
any suggestions for future ones,
I'd be very interested to hear from you
either via email, on Twitter, or in the
TaLC2020 conference panel.
Slides are available for download
and if you're interested in the
OER publication then let us know.
Here are some of my references and
just to finish off, I'd like to say big thank you
to the organisers who've made this
possible in spite of the current
situation: Thank you!
