Helping teachers to teach with corpora: The Corpus-Aided Platform for Language Teachers (CAP)

A corpus provides extraordinarily rich and flexible resources for self-learning and can guide students in finding answers to their language queries. Although corpus linguistics has become mainstream in language research, a corpus-based language teaching approach remains largely unknown to the frontline teachers due to various reasons. In the past few years, our EdUHK corpus team have been working towards bridging the gap between corpus linguistic research and teachers’ teaching practice by introducing a corpus-based language pedagogy (CBLP) to English teachers in Hong Kong, China’s Mainland and elsewhere. In this presentation, we will focus on an awardwinning website, The Corpus-based Platform for Language Teachers (CAP) (https://corpus.eduhk.hk/cap/), and demonstrate how we theorised CBLP and enacted CBLP training for in-service and pre-service English teachers through the learning and teaching resources we created on the CAP website. The CAP website serves as the ideal pathway to transfer our expertise in corpus linguistics to the broad teacher community in Hong Kong, China’s Mainland, and other regions/countries. We will first provide the theoretical framework for CBLP and then use concrete examples from the CAP website to show how we implemented the CBLP training for our target participants to help them develop competence to learn and teach with corpora. Copyright © 2022 ICELEAL.