D ELIMITACIÓN DEL CONCEPTO DE UNA INTELIGENCIA

Researchers have identified issues that may affect the acceptance by teachers of corpus tools and methods. Gavioli (2005) identified three initial areas of concern regarding the push for

using corpora as an equivalent for real language in use. First, despite claims to the contrary, a corpus of whatever size still remains a sample of language, with issues of representativeness and usefulness still in question. Second, being exposed to corpus-based authentic language does not necessarily translate into better learning for students and, for spoken language, raises the concern that unfiltered corpus-based materials may not emphasize specific features of language as

effectively as invented texts. Finally, ‘reality’ is a concept that goes beyond the collection of texts used for some other purposes, especially when taking into account the local circumstances of learners. These areas “raise issues concerning the relationship between corpora and learners as potential beneficiaries of corpus-derived information” (Gavioli, 2005, p. 19).

Gabrielatos (2005) stated in an examination of the relevance of corpus tools for teachers that “there is still a lot of ground to be covered until corpus use becomes a staple of language teaching and learning” (p. 23). In addition, Gavioli (2005) summarized five possible reasons for teacher resistance: poor communication from corpus researchers, a lack of any distinction between “what is scientifically interesting and what is pedagogically useful,” a perceived emphasis by teachers on non-linguistic elements of teaching and learning communicatively, teachers’ lack of access to corpora and corpus tools, and confusion over how to integrate corpus tools into existing pedagogy (p. 133).

Hunston (2002) described several challenges regarding the use of corpus tools in

language teaching, especially related to what might be considered the extreme attitudes of corpus proponents, or those ‘true believers.’ The most serious of these challenges are (i) a perceived over-reliance on native speaker corpora for data on patterns in language, (ii) an undue focus on frequency as the primary identifier for course content, and (iii) an emphasis on lexical chunks at the expense of more traditional grammar rules and vocabulary lists (pp. 192-197). While

Hunston refuted each of these claims, many teachers may still believe that only an ‘extreme’ version of corpus linguistics exists, and that applying corpus-based teaching methodologies to their professional development or classrooms would require them to have the same level of commitment to the ‘cause.’ It may be that teachers have many other pressing concerns as well as enormous demands on their time and energy.

Flowerdew (2009) also raised concerns about the application of corpus linguistics to pedagogy, stating that truncated concordance lines focus more on bottom-up processing, much corpus data is decontextualized, an inductive approach is emphasized, and finally students (and teachers) may have a difficult time selecting from a variety of corpora available to use and in fact may end up using an inappropriate corpus for the purpose they have. These issues require

solutions, and presenting corpus tools and corpus-based teaching methodologies to teachers without adequate resolution may only exacerbate the alienation of teachers. Of particular concern are the dual issues of contextualization (data removed from a larger context) and the principled selection of a corpus (for example, using a corpus of Time magazine articles to provide examples of good academic writing, which would likely present problems).

In Staples’ (2011) review of 26 corpus studies involving students in university settings, she noted that empirical data showing the benefit of corpus use in the classroom is limited, though it does appear to be effective in vocabulary development and, to a lesser degree,

pragmatic development. Finally, Flowerdew (2009) noted that ‘although there are a few accounts in the literature regarding the ‘pedagogic mediation’ of corpus data, these are few and far

between, indicating this is an area for further discussion and expansion” (p. 411). Römer (2008) recommended that teachers, along with students, need to receive training to work with corpora and evaluate concordance lines because actually identifying what is relevant versus what is not

requires extensive training, and each non-relevant conclusion could well make it that much more difficult to convince teachers of the benefits of corpus-based teaching methodologies.

Conrad (2007) examined the effects of training in corpus linguistics for pre-service and in-service teachers on their subsequent use of corpus tools and methods in their lesson planning. The results were not encouraging, as only two out of fifteen in-service teachers and three out of sixteen pre-service teachers used corpus materials in any substantive way. Concerns cited by participants included a lack of time to prepare materials, a lack of confidence in their own understanding and use of corpus tools, and questions about the relevance of corpus-based teaching methodologies to their classes. Conrad’s recommendations for building stronger links between corpus-based research and teachers were to develop stronger teacher education

materials based on available research, create more corpus-based books, address isolation of the early adaptors of corpus tools and corpus-based teaching methodologies in schools, and work on teacher education programs with greater emphasis on corpus-based language knowledge.

Heather and Helt (2011) identified several areas in which pre-service teachers found corpus tools to be useful: prioritizing teaching points, identifying student errors (when using a corpus of student writing), and creating authentic materials. Their participants noted limitations as well, such as the complexity of working with the tools and the time needed to analyze the data. It is also relevant to note that their participants were students working with this material as part of a class, rather than full-time teachers dealing with the issues that come with that role.

Conrad (2008, pp. 127-137) further stated in a discussion of the benefits of corpus tools for L2 writing teachers that at least in the case of academic writing, corpus analysis provides an opportunity to challenge flawed teacher intuition by studying authentic language in use. She provides concrete steps that teachers can take to benefit from corpus linguistics, which include

seeking out and using corpus-based research for the targeted language focus, balancing the urge for creativity with useful lexical bundles and appropriate vocabulary, and trying to develop skills in corpus tools. These steps are clearly meant to engage teachers in corpus-based teaching methodologies and the insights they can bring.