Teaching development grants progress report: The use of learners’ spoken corpus as a teaching tool in ESL classrooms

This project aims to develop a corpus-based training program to help teachers, learners and researchers have a better understanding of the major problems in learning English pronunciation by Hong Kong, Mainland and Southeast Asian learners in Hong Kong. According to Aston (2000), there are basically three fields for which corpus data can be used in English language teaching: a) Introduction: Teaching corpora. Equipping teachers with the basic skills for corpus-based language analysis; b) Exploitation: Helping teachers teach with speech corpus; and c) Transformation: Helping teachers discover ways of using corpora in their teaching. Based on this model, a learners’ pronunciation corpus will be expanded and analysed based on the framework built in the previous TDG project. Discovering learners’ pronunciation features through spoken corpora, teachers can identify learners’ recurrent difficulties in using segmental features and suprasegmental features of English and design lessons with that focus on reducing such difficulties.
The project will expand an existing learners’ corpus and develop a ten-session, corpus-based pronunciation training program for pre- and in-service teachers (including training lesson plans and materials) as well as ten sets of corpus-based sample lesson plans and teaching materials for primary and secondary students. The research findings and products will inform teaching and enhance teaching quality.