Overwhelming, Time-consuming, User-unfriendly... and Now What? Teacher Training for the Successful Integration of Corpus Use into Language Teaching

Abstract

This article presents a 30-hour training on state-of-the-art teaching techniques by the International Studies Center of the University of Pécs (Hungary). The training was attended by 48 in-service teachers, most of them teaching Hungarian to lower proficiency levels. I will first review previous research about teacher trainings on corpus use. Then, a detailed description of the four-step approach applied in this training as well as some activities will be provided. I will argue that effective teacher training should start with exploring specialized pedagogical corpora rather than large general ones and link innovative practices to well-known exercises. The participants’ feedback reveals that, while their reactions to corpus use are positive, they express their insecurity when it comes to analyzing corpus data by themselves. They seem to prefer ready-made material and worksheets prepared in collaboration and supervised by experts with respect to creating material on their own.