In-service EFL practitioners’ use of corpora in private English language schools

Despite the call for corpora to be integrated into the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom, hesitancy amongst teachers is still reported within research (Poole, 2020). Teachers with the most challenging conditions for integrating corpora are private language schoolteachers who often teach a high number of hours minimising their opportunities towards professional development (Stanley, 2016; Mercer, 2020). Frankenberg-Garcia (2012) recommends that small corpus activities could bring corpora into their classrooms despite required syllabi. Therefore, a five-week training programme which introduces corpora and helps teachers to design these short corpus activities was designed. 19 in-service teachers from across the globe completed the training programme over a two-year period, five of whom were teaching at private language schools in Ireland. This study focuses on investigating the experiences of these five teachers via a pre- and post-survey. Results showed that teachers were familiar with corpora, however very few had taught with a corpus in their classroom prior to taking part in the training programme. One year after the training programme concluded, teachers were surveyed about their use of corpora in their classroom.