OVERCOMING DIFFICULATIES IN USING LINGUISTIC CORPORA FOR TEACHING ENGLISH TO PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

Abstract

The rapid pace of technological advancement necessitates that Ukrainian graduates possess advanced digital literacy and critical thinking skills as well as lifelong learning abilities. Within this context, using linguistic corpora can be considered an effective approach which contributes to developing professional communicative competence by engaging students with authentic language data and promoting critical analysis and independent learning. The article addresses the challenges of integrating the direct corpus-based approach into pre-service English language teacher education. These include some limitations related to the technical domain (e.g. limited access to hardware and software, lack of digital skills, navigation issues) and those pertaining to pedagogical integration of corpus-based instruction (e.g. resistance to change, lack of student engagement, data overload). The authors stress the importance of understanding these limitations to effectively integrate the direct corpus-based approach into English language teaching. To overcome technological barriers, the authors suggest upgrading infrastructure, utilizing offline corpora, fostering peer mentoring, developing customized mini-corpora, enhancing digital literacy through targeted training of teachers and students, etc. The constraints within the pedagogical domain can be dealt with by raising awareness of the benefits of corpora use, integrating corpus-based activities into the regular curriculum, designing interactive tasks that align with students’ interests and learning goals, differentiated instruction, etc. Future research may involve creating a system of activities for developing professional communicative competence of pre-service teachers of English with the use of linguistic corpora.