A corpus-based analysis of ideologies in EFL teacher education policies

EFL teacher training has gained relevance over the last few decades due to the increasing importance of English as a lingua franca, however, this process is unquestionably embedded in linguistic and pedagogical beliefs about how this training should be. To explore this issue, the current mixed study aimed at reviewing teacher training policies with regards to the teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Chile. By doing so, it was expected to unmask the hidden beliefs about this pedagogical training, in particular on SLA courses. For these ends, this study employed corpus analysis techniques using keywords in context (KWIC) to determine the most frequent words in three corpora: 35 EFL teacher training curricula, 35 graduate outcomes/learning attributes of EFL teacher training programs and the guidelines provided by the Ministry of Education to train EFL teachers. This automatic analysis of keywords was conducted using the software Nvivo12 and was complemented by a qualitative analysis of collocations within the 20 most frequent tokens in each corpus. Results suggest that there is a discrepancy in the emphases that the universities provide to the different areas in this training, although they mostly focus on helping teacher candidates to achieve higher levels proficiency in English as a foreign language. On the contrary, the analysis of the guidelines by the Ministry of Education provides evidence that educational elements are more relevant, especially to understand how second language learning operates. Additionally, the graduate outcomes and learning attributes declared by the universities show evidence of the so-called ‘discourse of advertising.’ In here, universities promote attributes which are not always consistent with the curricula they offer, which is tied to neoliberal beliefs of education as academic programs would be products to be commercialized in the market of higher education.