Corpus Pedagogy: Analyzing Corpus Use in the Classroom and EFL Business Student Attitudes towards Corpora

For over thirty years corpus linguists have been discussing the applicability of corpora to language teaching. While their use in compiling dictionaries and shaping teaching materials has been promoted and celebrated, using corpora directly in the classroom has been propagated by some but rejected, or even ignored, by many. Those who have conducted research into such direct use of corpora have tended to select postgraduate students who have an intrinsic interest in language or linguistics. The results of such research have invariably been rather positive. This study aims to examine the application of one corpus at undergraduate level with students whose focus is on the more general area of business and establish whether similarly positive results are to be observed. The results of which indicate that the majority of participants benefited from the experience and valued their corpus activity. There was, however, some criticism concerning navigating the British National Corpus (BNC) and the time-consuming nature of corpus work. The diverse nature of students' performances reflects the wide range of student responses to engaging with corpus. The student' attitudes indicate that an active guiding role by the teacher may significantly improve the quality of such learners' involvement with corpora.