Using corpus approaches in language teacher action research

Action research (AR) is a prominent approach advocated on the vast majority of teacher education programmes. It is a localised, practical, and appropriately limited approach to doing highly specific and relevant research for individual teachers in their own context. In addition, teachers are motivated by the promise of better understanding their own students and their own practices in an attempt to improve them where relevant. Equally entrenched in this and other components of teacher preparation and development is the aligned notion of reflective practice. In fact, reflection/evaluation is one of the oft cited final steps in AR cycles. Similarly, many researching and working in the field of reflective practice have called for more evidence-based approaches to reflection. It is at this interchange that corpus linguistics creates a suitable solution through the use of appropriate corpora as data and evidence for the reflective stages of AR. The ways in which this can work in practice is the focus of two illustrative studies presented in this chapter, followed by a discussion of some of the implications for language teachers.