The Importance Of Language Teacher Education

Continued advancements in educational technology have fundamentally changed the way teacher education programs are being offered. Teacher educators today have unlimited opportunities to more broadly utilize and apply powerful technological tools, to equip teacher candidates with the skills, knowledge, motivation and support needed to incorporate the power of technology into their classrooms and instruction. Indeed, the influence of technology in teacher education programs is so great that, it is said, it has changed the “way teachers teach, and learn to teach” (Elliott, 2009, p. 433).

One area of interest within language teacher education (LTE) programs has been educating teachers across the field of computer-assisted language learning (CALL). In the last decades, the so called ‘CALL teacher education’ (Hubbard & Levy, 2006) has gained much popularity among teacher educators. In fact, in some parts of the world, teacher educators are obliged to incorporate CALL into their courses and language teachers, by the same token, are required to use computer technologies in their classes.

However, a long lasting concern still remains for teacher educators: what technical and pedagogical training in CALL is needed for language teachers? Some technologies such as e-mails, wikis, blogs, podcasts, webquests, whiteboards, etc. have been used widely; nevertheless, others have not yet been considered as positive and welcome addition to educational settings.

One of these relatively neglected technologies in language pedagogy is ‘corpus technology.’ Nowadays with the availability of personal computers and access to internet, it becomes increasingly convenient to explore a huge amount of text – both written and spoken – in elec...

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...cCarthy, 2008). Another contribution of corpora could be raising teachers’ linguistic awareness; i.e. awareness of the use of lexical items, collocation patterns and language structures (Tsui, 2004). Moreover, corpora analysis may promote teachers’ critical awareness by enabling them to examine the contents of dictionaries and textbooks against corpus data. Also, teachers can quench their professional curiosity by compiling their own corpora (either from learners, textbooks or the internet) and enhance their “research skills” and reflection (O’Keeffe & Farr, 2003, p. 389). On the whole, corpus-based research has the potential to serve as a “teacher development tool” (Vaughan, 2010, p. 472).

Despite such optimism, the reality is that corpus linguistics “has not been welcomed with open arms, neither by the research community nor the language teaching profession”