Do corpus data on World Englishes inspire tolerance of variation in ELT professionals? : An experimental questionnaire study with native English speaking teachers

Abstract

The present study aims to show that – given the status of English as a pluricentric global language and as a lingua franca – Corpus Linguistics has important and unique contributions to make to English Language Teaching (ELT). Desirable innovations arguably involve popularizing the use of corpus concordancing as a tool to put native speaker intuitions on a firmer empirical footing, and imbuing ELT practitioners with an awareness that variation –in particular (but not only) between geographical varieties – is an inherent and legitimate characteristic of language in use. To support these points, a quasi-experimental questionnaire study with 76 native English speaking teachers based at German universities is reported, which demonstrates the promises but also the obstacles of such an approach