Abstract
In recent years, it has become an issue of growing concern that, despite undiminished enthusiasm in the research community, the application of corpus tools and resources in the classroom remains limited. In this paper, I will argue that focusing on the role of the teacher in the process of using corpora in the classroom is an essential step towards popularising this approach. It is vital that future language teachers can discover corpora and concordances as part of their initial training from the perspectives as learner and as teacher. To this end, I will present and discuss a case study in which student teachers were introduced to corpus analysis and trained how to teach with corpora. Data on the reflections and opinions provided by the student teachers will highlight the significance and potential of such a course.
Notes
1. The Teaching Guidelines were developed in order to ensure a common educational standard (Bildungsstandards) among the different types of educational institutions in Germany. These binding guidelines define target competencies for the subjects such as English, German and Mathematics.
2. In order to prepare the language exercises despite these difficulties, many student teachers decided to use online concordancers, such as COBUILD Corpus Concordance Sampler or the BNC Simple Search.
3. More detailed feedback on the use of software was collected in the context of the software reviews written by the student teachers, but due to the limited scope of this article I will omit these results here. The issue of suitable concordancing software for language teaching is discussed in Breyer (Citation2006b).