Course description

The objective of the course is to introduce the participants to the concept of a corpus and its analysis and to outline various applications of corpora in language education, with special emphasis placed on the preparation of in-house teaching materials and class activities.

Several criteria were applied in the design of the course. The most important one was the presentation of a whole range of corpora, corpus-based materials and tools. The resources had to be free, easily available and stable in terms of access. Paid resources and tools are only mentioned in the presentations. The next criterion for the choice of resources was a relatively simple and user-friendly interface.

Another important idea in the design of the course was the exploration of different functionalities of the presented software. This is done with the aim of exemplifying various types of corpus analysis (e.g. studying differences between genres, retrieving collocations, etc.). The examples of possible corpus explorations are always set in the context of language learning activities rather than pure linguistic analysis.

Yet, the crucial element in course design was the demonstration of the whole array for corpus appliations in language teaching and learning, starting with serving as an accurate reference resource, through being a source of authentic language for class materials and activities up to providing learners with large amounts of linguistic data for discovery learning.

It is assumed that the most effective way of presenting the uses of corpora in language teaching is to engage the participants in a range of activities as language learners rather than as teachers or teacher trainees. Thus, the participants of this course  are exposed to a variety of language learning tasks at the advanced level, which they are asked to complete.