Designing a Corpus Workbook for Students of Czech as a Foreign Language

Adrian Jan Zasina

Abstract:

Language corpora are increasingly utilised in language learning around the world. The interest in using corpus methods for learning Czech appeared at the beginning of the 21st century. In 2005, a team of scientists from the Institute of the Czech National Corpus (Čermák et al., 2005) published the first study guide on how to use the Czech corpus and recommended it as a supplementary source for students from primary and secondary schools and universities. Two years later, Šulc (2007) described in a short guide for schools how to work step by step with corpus data; he explained the possible functions and usage of the Czech corpus. Over the next four years, the first
works concerning corpus use in teaching Czech as a foreign language (CFL) started to appear (Vališová, 2009; Lukšija, 2010; Osolsobě, 2010). Since then, several studies have appeared on corpora use in CFL teaching (cf. Lukšija, 2012; Vališová, 2012, 2016; Kočařová, 2013; Konečná & Zasina, 2014; Zasina, 2018b). The last few years have seen publications aimed at Czech teachers and students of teacher education for primary and secondary schools; these works (Šmejkalová & Kopřivová, 2019; Šormová et al., 2019) attempt to incorporate corpus methods developed for teaching native speakers of Czech. Zasina’s (2019) comprehensive study describes the most prominent problematic areas of non-native Czech based on a learner corpus and offers a coherent methodological framework for creating corpus-based exercises.
Despite a great deal of interest in corpus approaches to teaching, no substantial collection of corpus-based exercises has been created. Teachers are reluctant to use corpora in the classroom as it is a time-consuming task requiring computer skills and knowledge of the potential of corpus tools that might not be user-friendly (Bennett, 2010, pp. 206–207; Tribble, 2015, pp. 57–59; Leńko-Szymańska, 2017, p. 217). Thus, it is especially important to provide teachers with suitable learning materials that they could easily use. Giving them ready-to-use materials could help them to actively apply corpora in teaching.
This paper aims to familiarise teachers with the method of data-driven learning, describe the design of the corpus workbook, and recommend examples of corpus-based exercises.