アメリカ人および日本人によるオンラインコミュニケーションの対照分析 ―人気日記ブログにおけるUMCの機能と用法を中心に―

Tohoku University上原聡課

Bridging the Gap from the Other Side: How Corpora Are Used by English Teachers in Norwegian Schools.

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Authors of articles published remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons license agreement.Researchers have written of ‘bridging the gap’ between corpus linguistics and teaching practice. This study focuses on in-service English teacher informants from Norwegian schools, to try to address the ‘gap’ from the teaching practice ‘side’, rather than from the linguist ‘side’ engaged in spreading corpus linguistics. The study collects data on teachers’ familiarity with corpus linguistics, what corpora are used for and how, and teachers’ views on the obstacles to corpus use. The research question is How are corpora used by in-service English teachers in Norwegian schools? The research design consists of an online questionnaire and follow-up interviews. The questionnaire was answered by 210 teachers, 34 of whom answered they had done some work with corpora. The interviews were with three corpus-using teachers. The corpora they used were GloWbE, SkELL, Netspeak and COCA. Teacher-corpus interaction was for reference and for creating vocabulary and varieties of English exercises, and pupil-corpus interaction was encouraged by two of the teachers. The obstacles to the use of corpora were identified as differences between school levels, usability, and lack of teacher need. In concluding remarks, it is suggested that a starting point for corpus use among teachers may be to teach the tools and methods that seem to be already working for in-service teachers.publishedVersio

Norwegian in-service teachers’ perspectives on language corpora in teaching English

© 2022 Barry Kavanagh. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.This study aims to explore potential reasons why the use of the tools and methods of corpus linguistics are not prevalent in English teaching in Norway, using the research question What do in-service English teachers in Norway find useful about corpora and what do they find challenging? The study provides interview data from in-service teachers, contributing to our understanding of the in-service perspective on corpora. The research design consists of teaching corpus use in seminars for in-service English teachers (featuring LancsLex, the concordancer AntConc and the OANC), integrated into a language course that is part of a further education programme, and semi-structured interviews with four of the students who took the course, during which they also interacted with Netspeak, SKELL and COCA. As with previous research, the in-service teachers found corpora particularly useful for teaching and learning vocabulary, and found challenges to use which are categorized here as usability (criticism of AntConc), IT challenges (a lack of IT skills among teachers), learner-corpus interaction challenges (the complexity of software and concordance lines for pupils; pupil uninterest in language), and lack of teacher need (mistakes being “obvious” to teachers in the lower years). The article discusses some implications of these findings.publishedVersio