Pedagogical corpora as a means to reuse research data and analyses in teacher-training

One methodological challenge faced by CALL research is how to reuse data and analyses in ways that bridge the researcher-teacher gap (Colpaert, 2013). Building on LEarning and TEaching Corpora (LETEC) methodology for structuring data from online learning situations (Reffay et al., 2012; Wigham & Chanier, 2013), this paper presents the notion of pedagogical corpora as a means to foster pre-service teachers' professional development through reflective practice. Guichon and Hauck (2011) identified four different approaches to CALL-based teacher education, including 'confrontation with research findings' and 'action research'. In the first approach, when trainers want students to gain skills in developing online learning situations based on interactive, multimodal environments, they have recourse to the reading of CALL literature disconnected from actual data. In the second approach, pre-service teachers participate in experiments and adopt either the role of learners or tutors. In the latter case, attempts to use the same methodology for both data collection and training purposes are often difficult to manage: trainers face the issue that student materials are often heterogeneous and quickly extracted from the on-going experiment and pre-service teachers may only considering their individual practice. Carefully documented and selected materials from online courses studied in their original context would be very helpful. Pedagogical corpora offer possibilities to observe, examine and explore selected parts of a LETEC with reference to a lead identified within the research analyses performed. These pedagogical leads pertain to areas for enhancing either online L2 communication or interaction management. This paper presents the methodology developed for defining their structure (i.e. ways of extracting interaction data from LETEC and linking them to training tasks). We report on ways in which a pedagogical corpus can be used in teacher-training classrooms. The corpus discussed (Wigham & Chanier, 2013b) focuses on differences in tutor and student perceptions of collaboration in an online ESP course and compares and contrasts reflections from a teaching journal (Lewis, 2006) with interaction tracks from the LETEC corpus (Chanier et al., 2009).