Our Use of Corpus Linguistics in ReaLiTea to Empower Teacher Development

One of our core aims in the ReaLiTea (Research Literacy of Teachers) project is to support language teachers not only as readers of research but also as its producers. A powerful tool to realize this vision is corpus linguistics. As part of the project, we have been developing two specialized corpora to reveal how research is communicated both in written and spoken forms in the English Language Teaching (ELT) communities:

This initiative is to equip both pre-service and in-service teachers with the linguistic and rhetorical tools they need to confidently engage with and produce research. Since traditional academic texts can be inaccessible, we use corpus linguistics to help bridge the gap between academia and classroom practice. This data-driven approach enables us to create training materials that are grounded in how research is communicated in the ELT profession. For us, corpus linguistics is not just a research tool: It is a way to bring transparency and clarity to the ways research is communicated, thus an empowering tool for teacher development!

What Have We Done So Far?

We have created two corpora, or collections of specific text types. One is a corpus of written ELT research across four genres (research article abstracts, conference abstracts, OASIS summaries of secondary research, and reflective reports or chapters written by teachers). The second is a corpus of spoken ELT research across two genres (conference presentations by both researchers and practicing teachers, and video abstracts of published research articles).

The written corpus  includes

-        249 research articles from the ELT Journal (2015–2024)

-        701 conference abstracts from the AAAL Conference (2016–2024)

-        101 reflective reports from the ELICOS program and IATEFL Research SIG

-        54 OASIS summaries of secondary research articles

We chose all texts with a focus on authenticity, recency, and teacher relevance. For example, we focused on articles from the ELT Journal because of its practice-oriented and accessible format. We limited conference abstracts to the Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy (PED) strand of AAAL, ensuring relevance to classroom practice. Using established and adapted move-step frameworks from genre analysis, we examined the rhetorical organization and identified common lexical patterns and n-grams within each genre. These patterns reflect how ideas are commonly presented in research writing.

We have also built our spoken research corpus, consisting of

-        20 conference presentations by practicing teachers

-        10 conference presentations by ELT researchers

-        10 video abstracts of research articles

We selected the spoken texts from publicly available and high-quality sources (e.g., IATEFL) that teachers frequently access. We are currently analyzing the rhetorical and linguistic features of the spoken corpus.

What is Next?

Based on our findings, we will develop training materials to support teachers in exploring how research is communicated across genres. These resources will form the basis of blended and independent learning modules designed for teacher professional development.