This chapter will provide information and data about secondary schools and its teachers. The chapter will show in-depth interviews with teachers from secondary schools. The purpose of the in-depth interview is to research teacher needs, opinions, attitudes, values, and knowledge about computer corpora in general. The second goal is to explore in which way teachers in secondary schools would use computer corpora for creating teaching materials, exams, or language exercise. The aim of this chapter is to investigate if computer corpora can be implemented in secondary schools for teaching language subjects and in which way and for what students/grade it would be most eligible.
TopUsing Computer Corpora In Secondary Schools
This chapter will provide detailed information about use of computer corpora in secondary education level for creating educational materials for students from age 15 to 191. In research participated two teachers, one teacher teaches Croatian as first language and other teaches English and German as second language. Teachers did not use computer corpora in their line of work, and they did not search them before this research was conducted. During this research they were introduced with available corpora through user interface NoSketch Engine where they search, and filter concordance lines based on their quires. One teacher used British Web Corpus (ukWaC), German Web Corpus (deWaC), EU DGT-UD: German, EU DGT-UD: English and SkELL for research purpose while second teacher did not used any corpora. Secondary school in Croatia lasts for maximum of 4 years and there are different types of secondary schools. This research was conducted with two teachers who are working with students in secondary schools and their students age is approximately between 15 and 19 years.
Identity of the involved teachers will be protected, and they will remain anonymous. When describing their thoughts, citations and all relevant materials they will be referred as teacher AS and teacher BS. Teacher AS teaches Croatian as first language in secondary school Bedekovčina in Bedekovčina (place near Zagreb) and teacher BP teaches English and German as second language in secondary school Ugostiteljsko-turistička school (School for Tourism and Hospitality) in city Osijek. This chapter is divided into two main section, first section is named Case 1 and refers to teacher’s AS experience and attitudes about computer corpora, attitudes toward teaching process, working in secondary school, students’ attitude and motivation for learning Croatian language and using computer corpora in classroom, corpus linguistics, etc. Teacher AS is working in secondary school where teaching activities are conducted through three different courses: agricultural school, medical school and architecture/construction school. This school has three- and four-year programs. Teacher AS participated just in the in-depth interview, he did not develop corpus-based teaching materials for his students and did not introduced corpora to the students. But his contribution to this research is also valuable because of the insight to teachers attitudes and motivation for incorporating new teaching methodology and tools into the process of learning English language in secondary schools.
Second section is named Case 2 and refers to teacher’s BS experience working with computer corpora, experience and attitudes about computer corpora, teaching process, working in secondary school, students’ attitude and motivation for learning English and German language, corpus linguistics, etc. It is important to mention that teacher BS worked with computer corpora during this research. She prepared teaching unit using British and German corpora for her students. Because of the lack of time and insufficient equipment of classrooms she did not introduced computer corpora to her students. But she gave valuable information about preparation process of teaching materials for learning English and German language in secondary schools. This school has three- and four-year programs. Three-year program includes following professions: waiters, chefs and confectioners. Four-year program includes following professions: sales manager for tourism and hotels and technician for tourism and hotels.
Research was conducted through in-depth interviews with involved teachers in second half of school year 2018/2019. Structure of questions for conducting in-depth interviews was taken form doctoral theses of John D. Bunting from 2013 by the name An Investigation of Language Teachers’ Explorations of the Use of Corpus Tools in the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Class at Georgia State University. Questions from aforementioned dissertation were altered so they correspond to target group of participants and topic of this research. All questions which were included in the in-depth interviews can be seen at the end of the book in separate section named Appendix A.