A Study Of The Application Of Corpus To EFL Speaking Teaching Practice

Over the past decades, not only has corpus linguistics revolutionized applied linguistic research but also has exerted great influence on EFL teaching and learning. More and more applied linguists acknowledge the important role that corpora could play in teaching and learning process. Romer (2009) claims that corpus linguistics has immense potential to enhance EFL pedagogical practice. However, the actual application of corpus by English teachers in China remains uncommon. Although numerous researches have shown the feasibility of corpus application in EFL teaching and learning (e.g. Reppen,2010; Scott & Tribble,2006; Sinclair,2004b), as far as the researcher’s knowledge could reach, few studies present how well it works in actual practice and its popularity among teachersTo address this gap, this study attempts to investigate effects of the use of corpus on enhancing spoken English teaching from the perspective of meeting student teachers’ teaching needs.98 respondents were identified by emails among student teachers’ chatting group to investigate their teaching needs with the instrument of questionnaire. Then out of these 98 participants,10 College English student teachers were selected as the research subjects of the effects of corpus tools on EFL speaking teaching.A mixed research method was employed in this study. Beginning with a survey of teaching needs by the means of questionnaire and exploratory interviews, the researcher conducted multiple in-depth interviews and class observations to explore teachers’ reflections on the actual application of corpus tools to their teaching practice. With thematic analysis of the data collected, themes emerged to illustrate that corpus tools facilitated these 10 research subjects’ teaching practice by compensating teaching materials, motivating students’ class participation, and improving student teachers’ English proficiency. Based on the results of the 10 cases, the researcher made pedagogical implications for enhancing EFL speaking teaching practice with application of corpus. The investigation of these pertinent issues with a participant group of 10 student teachers leads to the conclusion that there is generally a positive predisposition towards the use of corpus in spoken English teaching practice.