Integrating corpus literacy into language teacher education

Despite the increasing popularization and availability of corpus tools and resources, the practice of English language teaching still seems to be only marginally affected by the corpus-linguistic turn, because comparatively few teachers were trained in corpus linguistics and use corpora or corpus software regularly themselves (Mukherjee 2004; Römer 2011). This chapter first reports on a recent survey that updates and largely confirms Mukherjee’s (2004) findings. It is argued that while university students of modern languages are increasingly familiarized with the research-based use of corpora in linguistic content classes, this research perspective is not sufficiently translated into a teaching perspective for corpora to be considered a useful addition to the toolbox of language teachers. The chapter then reports on the integration of corpus linguistics into the curriculum for English language teacher students by exposing them to the use of corpora and corpus methods from a researcher’s, teacher’s and learner’s perspective.