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CORPORA IN LANGUAGE TEACHING / QUESTIONNAIRE

This questionnaire is addressed to language teachers, teacher educators and researchers who ARE and who ARE NOT using language corpora in their teaching. It will be greatly appreciated if you could help by completing this questionnaire, no matter which group you are in.

INTRODUCTION

A language corpus (plural: corpora) is a collection of texts which can be analysed using different computer programs, including concordancing programs. A concordance of a word lets you see all the instances in which it occurs in a collection of texts, and to see the contexts in which that word is used. An example from a concordance for the word "listen" is given below. The texts used were in the Spoken section of the British National Corpus:

28 have a say. You 've got to listen. Yeah. Nobody listens to
29 Ah, since when does nobody listen to you? At school they do
30 l do, we 'll do, Paul Paul listen, do n't be distracted. We
31 nderstand I 'm on about listen listen to me. You ca n't t
33 ight, had a back to back No listen, this is funny, she lived

Using this kind of corpus data, it is possible to find out about features such as word frequency, collocation, and phraseology and to investigate the ways in which words combine with one another in different contexts. Such information has been hugely influential in the development of modern dictionaries and grammars, and linguists have been using corpora for the last twenty or thirty years. However, most language teachers have not started to use this kind of resource in their own teaching, and I have prepared this questionnaire to try to find out more about who is using corpus data, who is not - and why.

I've been involved in using corpora in language teaching since the late 1980s, but it remains a minority sport. I'm trying to find out why. Your responses will help make the picture clearer, so I do hope that you will be able to give the time to complete the survey - it should only take around 10 minutes.

Please be assured that all responses are entirely anonymous, and that no personal data is obtained through the survey process.

Many thanks for your cooperation.

Chris Tribble
Department of Education and Professional Studies,
King's College, London University

PLEASE NOTE - I want to find out about teachers who DO and who DO NOT use corpora in their teaching. I would be very grateful if you could complete it which ever group you are in! The questionnaire is the third version of one which I last distributed around seven years ago (!), and has been designed to build on the responses I obtained in 2001. Even (especially?) if you responded to the earlier survey, I would be very grateful if you could also complete this version!
 
Please contact ctribble@clara.co.uk if you have any questions regarding this survey.