Barriers to trainee teachers' corpus use
Résumé
The benefits of direct corpus exploration by language learners are widely attested for tertiary education contexts but less so for secondary school environments. The integration of data-driven learning (DDL) into a teacher education program is a promising method to spread the word, although there may still be barriers which hinder trainee teachers from viewing direct corpus exploration as a viable option for the secondary language learning classroom. Which sort of barriers can be identified? To what extent are they linked to technical issues or to conceptual ones? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by exploring how a module on technology-enhanced course design was used to introduce selected features of Sketch Engine to trainee teachers of L2 German in a French secondary school context, training them in basic corpus exploration methods with a view to creating a corpus-based language learning task for use for younger learners. Rogers' (1962) factors for innovation processes served as an analytical framework from which to investigate qualitative classroom observations, interviews, and evaluations of the trainees’ attempts to create DDL tasks. The results suggest that both technical barriers (e.g. limited knowledge of corpus query syntax, complex corpus functions) and conceptual barriers (e.g. teacher beliefs about younger learners’ capabilities, preferences for other teaching tools) hinder both trainees’ DDL task construction and their eventual uptake of corpus use with younger learners. These issues could be resolved by providing the trainees with corpus query samples and with reusable and adaptable corpus-based activities. The choice of a user-friendly corpus analysis tool and of pedagogically relevant resources play also an important role for the adoption of DDL methods and tools by language teachers.