Teachers' perceived corpus literacy and their intention to integrate corpora into classroom teaching: A survey study

Abstract

Given the importance of corpus linguistics in language learning, there have been calls for the integration of corpus training into teacher education programmes. However, the question of what knowledge and skills the training should target remains unclear. Hence, we advance our understanding of measures and outcomes of teacher corpus training by proposing and testing a five-component theoretical framework for measuring teachers' perceived corpus literacy (CL) and its subskills: understanding, search, analysis, and the advantages and limitations of corpora. Also, we hypothesised that teacher CL is linked to their intention to use corpora in classroom teaching. Specifically, 183 teachers and student teachers received corpus training to develop their CL and then completed a survey to measure their CL and intention to use corpora in teaching in Likert-scale items together with open-ended questions. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that a hierarchical factor structure for CL using the aforementioned five subfactors best fitted the data. Moreover, structural equation modelling indicated that CL is positively linked to the participants' intention to integrate corpora into classroom teaching. While all five subskills are important for teachers, greater effort should be made to develop their corpus search and analysis skills, which can be viewed as the bread and butter of corpus training.