Corpus Linguistics in Pre-service Teaching in Bahia Communities of Practice: Challenges, Innovation and Autonomous Learning

The impact of corpora is easily observable in Linguistics: it has changed the way we understand language use. However, despite their potential for impact in society, the use of corpora inside and outside the university settings in Northeast Brazil is still restricted. Rather than compiling another research corpus, the present project aims at engaging several educational communities in the use of freely available corpora. The use of CL in teacher education opens exciting prospects in the teaching of English to speakers of other languages (ESOL): it can be seen as “a new pedagogical perspective to foreign language acquisition” (Granger, 2002). This Project presents the práxis of CL in pre service teaching in Northeastern Public Universities in Bahia, Brazil. It also presents results of the expanding use of pedagogical applications of CL in small rural public secondary schools as well. 1. Corpus Linguistics & English language teaching: a view on Northeast Brazilian Communities of Practice Corpus Linguistics (CL) has revolutionized the way we describe, theorize and research languages. As Leech (1992) explains it, CL is a “methodological basis for pursuing linguistic research, a new research enterprise, a new way of thinking about language” (p. 106). Research centres in the UK have taken the lead in CL research, and several researchers have collected huge amounts of textual data in a principled way. Some of these collections, known as corpora, are available online in an open access form (e.g. British National Corpus). Among its advantages in ESOL, CL helps teachers and students to identify which words/structures are more (or less) frequently used in a given genre/register and to investigate their linguistic patterning. Several reasons account for the pedagogical impact of Corpus Linguistics (CL) research in second/foreign language learning. Granger (2009) believes that regarding ELT, there are very promising teaching and learning resources once the teacher is familiar with the area. One rather fundamental reason is that CL approach makes it possible for the teacher to design needs-based and learner centered applications, as this is mostly evident in making direct use of corpora by encouraging learners to look at corpus data and intuitively getting information about language. One way of encouraging learners to use corpora is to enhance the pedagogical relevance (Braun, 2005) of corpus use. It seems reasonable to address the influence of the pedagogical functions of DDL, which can be best described as “the attempt to cut out the middle man as far as possible and give the learner direct access to data” (Johns, 1991). In its broadest sense, DDL has both direct and indirect uses and applications. Paredes et al (2011) discuss such uses of corpora and explain that by indirect