The Perception of Teachers and Learners towards an Exploratory Corpus-based Grammar Instruction in a Korean EFL Primary School Context

Abstract

The current study explores the perceptions of teachers and young Korean students (12 years old) towards corpus-based grammar instruction. Despite the pedagogical efforts to introduce corpora into classrooms, the research at the elementary school level is underdeveloped. Thus, this exploratory study aims to identify the possibility of corpus-based learning in Korean elementary schools in a qualitative manner. For this, corpus-based learning materials (paper-based corpus sheets and worksheets) were developed, using Sketch Engine and two small corpora created from English literature for children. After two sessions of corpus-based grammar class on the prepositions in/at/into, three teachers and 18 students (6th graders) from three elementary schools were interviewed. The key findings of this research are as follows. Whereas teachers considered guided learning vital for students to elicit a pattern from corpus, students favored the process of discovering rules together through interaction. Regarding the self-reported efficacy of corpus-based learning, teachers and students both mentioned that this raised awareness of how to use prepositions, which helped the students' output skills (e.g. writing). Also, students tended to say that this was more helpful for remembering what they learned, rather than rote memorization of grammar rules. Considering the low-level students, the meaning of words or translations of concordance lines were needed. Also, training for corpus-based learning seems necessary to gain familiarity with this type of learning. Overall, this research has found the possibility of corpus-based learning in elementary school English classes to be promising. This study further suggests ideas for better introduction of corpus-based learning into elementary school classes in Korea.