“Corpus Made My Job Easier”: Preservice Language Teachers’ Corrective Feedback Practices in Writing with Corpus Consultation

Abstract

Recently several studies have targeted the phenomenon of feedback-giving practices and reported that providing concise, accurate, and unintuitive feedback plays an important role in improving students’ writing. Giving feedback however can be challenging for language teachers, and they might need to consult strategies to provide students with accurate and effective feedback. Using a corpus, a large collection of real language samples which can be investigated with specific tools, is one of these strategies that language teachers can use in giving effective feedback. This study investigates the perceptions of preservice language teachers about corpus consultation when giving corrective feedback. To this end, in this qualitative study, a group of preservice language teachers was given written texts as an error correction exercise. The participants corrected the errors with the help of a corpus. A survey with open-ended questions and a focus group interview were held to determine the perceptions of the participants. Based on the analysis of data, three themes emerged (advantages and challenges of corpus consultation and purposes of corpus use). The results provide an overview of how pre-service language teachers perceive corpus consultation and corpus use in the process of giving corrective feedback. This exploration of corpus-based feedback practices by preservice language teachers can make essential contributions to language teaching practices in particular and the corrective feedback literature in general. Despite some limitations, this study presents the potential benefits and challenges of using corpus-based feedback reported by preservice language teachers. The pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed.