This study investigated teachers' perceptions about the implementation of ready-made and interactive-DDL materials (a resource developed to facilitate DDL activities) after professional development workshops for instructors of Portuguese and Russian as a FL using the learner corpus MACAWS. Challenges reported by the participants, and suggestions to tackle them are discussed.
Learner corpora have untapped potential for language teaching by providing instructors with large amounts of representative learner data (Granger, 2002) used to produce data-driven learning (DDL) materials (Johns, 1991; Gilquin & Granger, 2010; Flowerdew, 2015). One of the issues hindering a more prominent use of DDL by instructors is the paucity of open educational resources (Leńko-Szymańska, 2017), which contributes to a gap between DDL research and pedagogical practice. This is especially true about teacher training on how to design and implement corpus-based materials for less commonly taught languages (LCTLs), such as Portuguese (Spina, 2017). In this study, we investigated the use of interactive DDL (iDDL) to implement DDL materials using concordance embedding from an online corpus platform. iDDL is a resource developed to facilitate incorporation of DDL activities into existing learning management systems (e.g. Canvas, D2L, Blackboard). We examined teachers' perceptions about the implementation of both ready-made and their own D-DDL materials. Data were gathered over the course of a year from instructors (N=10) in Russian and Portuguese foreign language programs in Southwest U.S. collected during professional development workshops on how to use D-DDL. The materials were created using the Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments -- Writing and Speech (MACAWS), a learner corpus composed of 2,075 texts produced by 255 students of Portuguese (536,168 words) and 812 texts produced by 100 students of Russian (111,705 words). We analyzed field notes taken during the workshops, survey responses answered by the instructors after each workshop, and the iDDL materials created by the participants, along with their rationale for implementing these in their classrooms. Preliminary findings show how instructors used the corpus, and what issues they faced regarding designing and implementing activities in their classrooms. Results will be discussed in light of needs for future DDL training, technical and pedagogical challenges reported by the participants, and how these challenges may be overcome.
