Issues in tertiary online CALL resources development: A corpus-based materials case study

This paper outlines research initiatives regarding the implicit and explicit use of corpus data in language education. The topic came to the fore at the HKIEd, where the Web serves as an increasingly important platform for language teaching and learning in tertiary education. Indeed, the HKIEd has been involved in a number of projects seeking to develop a online CALL resources. However, a number of problems and issues were encountered during the process. This paper introduces the context for the research and outlines the body of CALL resources developed at HKIEd. It then focuses specifically on research initiatives that address the problems and challenges encountered in the use of one of these self-developed CALL resources, an online English-Chinese Parallel Concordancer program designed to enable students to carry out comparative language studies in different linguistic areas utilizing parallel corpus data. The results of the investigation suggest that some students greatly benefited from the corpus-based and learner-centred data-driven learning approach, other students expressed concerns about being exposed to raw corpus data individually and without sufficient guidance. This paper is intended as a sharing of the kind of problems and challenges we might face in using computer technology in language education, and how we might solve them.