ARTIGO

Getting started with digital literacy using pedagogic

corpora in young learners’ English classes

Iniciando o letramento digital usando corpora nas aulas de Inglês de alunos

das séries iniciais

FLUXO DA SUBMISSÃO

Ana Lúcia Surerus Pitanguy MARQUES

alpitanguy@gmail.com

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, MG, Brasil.

Submissão do trabalho: 26/04/23

Aprovação do trabalho: 11/11/23

Publicação do trabalho: 24/11/23

Deise Prina DUTRA

deisepdutra@gmail.com

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, MG, Brasil.

Abstract

This paper addresses the provision of instruction to teachers and learners on

becoming digitally literate and skilled with corpus-based tools. It proposes

the compilation of specific pedagogic corpora, in this case in Geography and

Science, to be used in the English young learners’ classes in elementary

education.The paper also illustrates the handling of user-friendly

concordancer’s tools of #LancsBox 6.0 to perform basic analysis of the

corpora language through a more accessible technology. It concludes by

summarizing the possible benefits of an alternative approach to expose

learners to customized corpus-informed language in English.

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0.23925/2318-7115.2023v44i2e61842

Keywords: Pedagogic corpora, Digital literacy, Young learners, Concordancer

tools.

Resumo

Este artigo discorre sobre a necessidade de professores e alunos se tornarem

letrados digitalmente e habilitados a usar ferramentas de análise do conteúdo de

corpora. Propõe-se a compilação de dados específicos, neste caso de Geografia e

Ciências, para uso pedagógico em aulas de inglês do ensino fundamental I. O

artigo ilustra a utilização básica das ferramentas digitais do software #LancsBox

6.0 que analisam o conteúdo através de uma tecnologia mais acessível. Conclui-se

apresentando possíveis benefícios do uso de uma abordagem de ensino

alternativa que exponha os jovens aprendizes ao conteúdo linguístico em inglês

baseado em corpora.

Palavras-chave: Corpora pedagógicos, Letramento digital, Jovens aprendizes,

Ferramentas de concordância.

Distribuído sob Licença Creative Commons

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1. Introduction

The most recent generation of young learners, currently in elementary school, is certainly

one that challenges the learning / teaching boundaries of the past even further while demanding

teachers’ mentoring in new ways in the classroom. To this date, teachers’ roles have been multi-

faceted, trying to provide learners not only with the subject-matter contents of their lessons but

also guiding them towards meeting learning goals. However, most of those roles are now being

disputed as technology and portable devices, available to a large portion of the population, offer

learners instantly the information required for their day-to-day lives. It is the turning point of the

source of knowledge: the tools available can supply the present generation of learners with the

right answers at the tip of their fingers.

The teachers are still invaluable as curators of the information readily available, but their

roles have been changing fast as the new generation gradually takes agency of their own learning

path. It is a long-held belief among educators that contemporary education should enable learners

to be more engaged and committed to their own learning process and responsible for the results

(Chambers, 2010). This is the window of opportunity teachers have to motivate learners to make

effective use of the digital tools available to improve learning and lighten their weight as linguistic

authorities they traditionally have had (Aston, 2007).

As an immediate result of the fast pace of change in the educational scenario, the sudden

advance of technology has brought into the scene the need to know English to navigate and visit

websites, as it is the most commonly used language on the internet. Young learners need to start

learning at a much younger age and in tandem they need to acquire the ICT skills demanded by

the new digital learning mode. All those involved in their literacy process should start considering

that the changes have to take place urgently.

Thus, to broaden young learners’ linguistic scope, we started to speculate about a way to

accelerate the English learning in subjects like Geography and Science at a much younger age

(Marinova-Todd et al, 2000), while attempting to integrate corpus-informed pedagogy in our

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Fundamental 1 schools. If, as a first step, second language (L2) teachers could resort to topicalized

corpora, i. e., corpora in other subjects other than general English, to devise activities for cross-

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Fundamental I (Brazil) and Elementary (US) years are equivalent and will be used interchangeably.

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curricular projects, they would be able to increase young learners’ exposure to L2 vocabulary in

their early school years. If learners could take part in the change, it would motivate and engage

them in the process of discovering the intricacies of the language patterns by themselves

(

Schmidt, 1990; Johns, 1990; Sinclair, 1991). The corpora would offer the authentic language

McCarten, 2007) in the correct levels of proficiency and in the topics they would otherwise be

(

only exposed to in their first language (L1). Such exposure could trigger deliberate learning, for

example, with learners working with vocabulary where the primary aim of the activity is to learn

intentionally and explicitly target words (Webb; Chang, 2012).

In response to the claims above, this paper addresses the demands of contemporary

society for a more inclusive classroom. We focus on the advantages of using pedagogic corpora

and the digital tools that facilitate its use. Section 2 discusses briefly relevant principles underlying

second language acquisition which resonate with approaches now proposed for the classwork.

Section 3 claims that both teachers and learners should be better oriented in the educational

digital environments. It then proposes one way of improving vocabulary and language patterns

learning by using pedagogic corpora and a concordancer which analyzes language to be used for

class activities. In Section 4, it outlines the compilation of a pedagogic corpus with language at an

appropriate level for elementary school students (Pérez-Parede, 2020) and in Section 5 describes

how the contents are accessed and analyzed by a very user-friendly concordancing software -

2

#

LancsBox 6.0 . In Section 6, it describes how digital tools are used to examine some language

combinations and patterns and hopes to motivate teachers and young learners to make

meaningful use of it. In Section 7, it compares briefly the pedagogic corpus with a traditional adult

corpus, in this case the BNC2014-baby. Section 8 has the authors’ remarks and a conclusion

showing the positive aspects of using technology with teachers and young learners.

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. Revisiting second language acquisition (SLA)

Research in the depth and breadth of SLA to date has reiterated the advantages of learners

being exposed to contextualized L2 in the classroom. One widely recommended approach to

vocabulary learning is the selection and use of different activities on the same topic where words

2

<

http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/download.php > However, there is a new version of the software at

<

https://lancsbox.lancs.ac.uk/ >. Access In February 20, 2023.

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are grouped semantically into lexical sets to increase the potential for the recurrence of target

vocabulary exposure (Nation, 2020; Schmidt, 1990). Investigations have pointed out that noticing

and discovering the relationships between the words that are presented together have a great

impact on language learning (Ellis, 2012). Many of those multi-word clusters, words that are

frequently together in a specific corpus, also known as formulaic language, are constantly being

scrutinized by researchers. From the decade-old usage-based model (Ibidem, 2012) advocating the

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importance of frequency, context and recency of formulaic language to enable learners to

transform it into intake, to the more recent Formulaicity Principle ⁴ (O’Keeffe; Mark, 2023), it

seems that language noticing, frequency of occurrence and recurrence of exposure have pivotal

roles in the L2 learning literature.

Summarizing, the combination of explicit instruction (Ellis, 2002) with target language (TL)

recurrence of exposure (Gabrielatos, 2005) can promote noticing (Schmidt, 1990) of words and

multi-word sequences (Cortes, 2004). These can be made salient through learners’ manipulation

of concordance lines (Johns, 1990) in activities which can foster language retention. Concordance

lines are micro contexts of specific keywords yielded by concordancer tools explained in detail in

Section 6.

3

. Digital literacy for teachers and learners

As of 2018 and onwards, the guidelines in the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) state

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that teachers need to be skilled and equipped to help young learners acquire and develop, among

other competencies, the digital competency in the Fundamental I:

5. Understand, use and create digital information and communication technology, in a

meaningful, reflexive and ethical way, in the various social practices (including the school ones)

to communicate, access and share information, create knowledge, solve problems and take

agency of own personal and collective life (BRASIL, 2018: 9)⁶

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Recency claims that the more recently we experience a construction, the stronger our memory of it is (O’Keeffe;

Mark, 2023 adapted from Ellis, 2012).

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Formulaicity develops across levels of language proficiency and is a marker of an advanced learner (O’Keeffe; Mark,

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023).

5

Brazilian National Syllabus Core.

Authors’ translation for: “5. Compreender, utilizar e criar tecnologias digitais de informação e comunicação de forma

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crítica, significativa, reflexiva e ética nas diversas práticas sociais (incluindo as escolares) para se comunicar, acessar

e disseminar informações, produzir conhecimentos, resolver problemas e exercer protagonismo e autoria na vida

pessoal e coletiva” (BRASIL, 2018: 9).

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Therefore, it is of paramount importance to consider, first, the extent to which the

teachers have access to the hardware and, second, if they have the technical skills to be able to

navigate the online medium. They also need to learn to curate the appropriate information before

they can implement innovations in the classroom. According to Meunier (2020), teachers

themselves may still today not always see the added value of integrating them into their lessons.

And recently, Crosthwaite (2022) corroborated those statements by positing that many young

learners’ teachers still lack both the technical and pedagogical knowledge to integrate Computer

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Assisted Language Learning (CALL) applications into teaching practice.

The scenario described above reflects just some of the difficulties teachers have to

st

overcome to transform their classrooms into 21 century educational environments. First, they

need to learn to curate the information available online. Second, they need to learn to use the

digital tools to search for language patterns, and only then they would be ready to help learners

interpret the results and make effective use of the findings in the classroom. That is, when working

with concordancing software and data analysis, teachers need to realize and accept the fact that

their role changes fundamentally,

as s/he is no longer the sole source of knowledge about the target language, but rather a

facilitator of the learning process, helping the learners to interpret the data, and giving

them advice on how best to search the corpus and analyze their search results

(Chambers, 2019, p.354).

Learners also need to be digitally literate to look for information on the web. According to

BNCC, they need to be exposed to the digital medium, learn to navigate safely and identify suitable

and trustworthy sites which suit their learning goals. They also need to learn to analyze critically

the information they receive or send. They need to be acquainted with the use of web search

engines appropriately to understand how to find what they need and be able to understand and

interpret output of its particular discursive functions in context (Hafner; Candlin, 2007). To

empower learners with digital skills, Redecker insists that learning resources and activities, among

other aims, should “open up learning to new, real-world contexts, which involve learners

themselves in hands-on activities, scientific investigation or complex problem solving, or in other

ways increase learners’ active involvement in complex subject matters” (2017, p.22).

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The term Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) was coined by Hardisty and Windeatt (1989).

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4

. Pedagogic corpora for young learners

To change the teaching approach and empower learners with hands-on activities, this

Section outlines the compilation of pedagogic corpora which are aimed to be used in language

teaching in a future study and, therefore, has been designed with pedagogic purposes in mind

8

(

Pérez-Paredes, 2020; Willis, 2011). The balanced corpora, COREL-GEO+SCI , composed of

textbooks and website oral and written texts represent the language variety in Geography and

Science relevant in the specific teaching context (Friginal, 2018) of elementary school grades.

Hence, and in line with Willis’s (1998) definition of pedagogic corpus as a body of texts to

be used in the classroom to support teaching (texts from the learners’ coursebooks) with any

additional texts that the teacher may bring into the classroom (Gilquin; Granger, 2010), pedagogic

corpora were compiled to suit elementary young learners’ - 9 - 12 years old - needs and interests.

Small corpora would seem to be both useful as instruments of language learning in their

own right, and as means of training learners to use corpora appropriately (Aston, 2007). Aston

also mentions other benefits of small corpora: easier to construct, to interpret, to become familiar

with and to allow language to be more fully analysable. While size is usually an issue, it should be

considered hand-in-hand with the appropriateness of corpus design. In terms of suitability,

however, it is often the design of a corpus as opposed to its size which is the determining factor

(O’Keeffe et al., 2007, p.4).

Regarding corpora contents, besides the intended audience of young learners in

elementary school, the authors considered their regular school syllabi, selecting subjects with an

overarching reach: Geography and Science. That is, the corpora should serve the pedagogic aims

of the project they had been designed for (Reppen, 2010; Xiao, 2010; Jablonkai, 2022). Topics

(Table 1) were selected based on the usefulness and essentialness constructs for learners` school

grades and the connection with the syllabi, so as to make the experience of working with

concordance lines not only useful but also meaningful and beneficial.

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COREL-GEO+SCI - Corpora for Elementary levels, a conflation of two corpora: a Geography corpus and a Science

corpus.

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Table 1. Themes and topics for the pedagogic corpora.

Source: the authors.

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Texts from six different authentic sources within the A1-A2 framework of language were

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then collected: printed workbooks A , printed workbooks B , web texts / video transcriptions and

articles from assorted sources on the web.

Table 2. Subsets of corpora information.

Source: #LancsBox.

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The pedagogic corpus, COREL- GEO+SCI, for this study is a conflation of two corpora with

a total of 895 texts, a balanced number of 437 texts in Science (COREL- SCI) and 458 texts in

Geography (COREL- GEO) separated by topic / theme (Table 2). They can also be identified by

school grade if necessary. Corpus contents also make it possible to expose learners to authentic

9

According to the CEFR – Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

1

0

1

th

1

80 Days of Science and Geography, Shell Education, K to 5 grade, 2014.

th

DK WORKBOOKS, Penguin Random House, Pre-K to 4 grade, 2016.

2

The GEO and SCI corpora can be split in two and teachers would use them according to the syllabi.

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language and actually present them with a large number of instances of a particular linguistic item

to work with them all at once (Cobb, 1997).

5. The concordancer #LancsBox 6.0

To access the corpora data, it is paramount that teachers have the digital skills to work

with a concordancer. Concordancers are common corpus analysis tools that search texts based

on a word or phrase provided by the user and yield them in contexts called concordance lines or

rank them according to their frequency in that corpora. This section explains how the

concordancer was chosen and what its tools can accomplish at the user`s basic level of

understanding. The literature suggests that if the digital tools are (1) hard to use or (2) perceived

to be hard to use, then widespread adoption of the tools is not likely (Hendry; Sheepy, 2022).

These authors mention the importance of the multidimensional construct of usability to identify

and select the most appropriate concordancer to use in the classroom.

According to Hendry and Sheepy (2022), in a recent study comparing concordancing

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softwares, #LancsBox , a freely available online concordancer with a unique graphical interface,

was found to be the easiest for some to use. The 6.0 version has a straightforward interface and

accompanying tutorials and is very suitable as a first step to those teachers trying to get

acquainted with the current technological tools. Those factors have prompted us to choose it

taking into account the aims of its creators (Brezina; Gablasova, 2018). At the time, they declared

that they were interested in improving learner vocabulary instruction through corpus analysis,

mainly keyword and collocation analysis.

Once the software has been chosen, the first requirement for teachers and learners to

output data is to know its tools. The software tutorials are short, the explanations objective, and

the repetition of procedures associated with a little curiosity towards experimenting with other

tools may help teachers overcome any initial barriers. The software already has many corpora

embedded in its system such as American English, British English, BNC, Brown, LOB, English

Literature, etc. Additionally, one can upload one’s specialized corpus and use it like the example

of the pedagogic corpus mentioned here and in the next Sections. By using a concordancer with

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<http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/index.php >.

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a readily-understood interface and meeting the criterium of being user-friendly, our main aim was

to address the ‘user-friendliness’ aspect mentioned by Frankenberg-Garcia (2012) to show

teachers the way to start developing their digital literacy.

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. Pedagogic corpora and the concordancer analysis tools

Hendry and Sheepy (2022, p.439) put forward the idea that “learners can use corpus

analysis tools to support vocabulary acquisition (1) as a reference to identify important words to

study, (2) as a reference to check for patterns in typical usage in authentic texts”, language

improvement and development of autonomous work. Hence, Table 3 illustrates the interface of

the software #LancsBox 6.0 showing its basic tools in the black bar at the top. The tools were

used, first, to extract lists of most frequent words, then, content words as well as multi-word 3-

gram clusters from COREL- GEO (Corpus for Elementary Levels on Geography) and COREL- SCI

(Corpus for Elementary Levels on Science) to be described in sections 6.1 to 6.4.

The next step was to have the most frequent items in the lists, and some were selected as

KWICS (key words in context) to obtain the concordance lines - their micro contexts. Findings in

concordance lines (KWIC tool) and collocation visualization tools (GraphColl tool) can help

learners recognize and remember collocations (Hendry and Sheepy, 2022). This condensed

exposure (Gabrielatos, 2005) can contribute to heightened awareness of language patterns,

vocabulary expansion and retention (Granger, 1998).

Table 3. #LancsBox 6.0 interface.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

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.1 Words tool

First, the ‘Words’ tool (in the black bar in Table 3) was used to generate the lists of the

most frequent words in the corpus COREL-GEO (Table 4) and COREL-SCI (Table 5).

Table 4. Most frequent words in COREL-GEO.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

Table 5. Most frequent words in COREL-SCI.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

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At a glance it is possible to see that the results are somewhat similar as most frequent

words are function words. The content words, though, which constitute the core vocabulary of

each subject come up somewhat differently (e.g., people, plants). Therefore, it is necessary to

make some changes in the header to obtain the list of most frequent nouns and verbs to get the

corpora content differences. The same procedures can be used for adverbs, adjectives and other

word classes of interest. First, one should left-click ‘Type’ at the top blue header (Table 5),

changing Type to Lemma by clicking the arrow. After that, right-click on the black bar, next to the

word Type, and a pop-up window will open. Add: *_v, or *_n, or *_adj or *_adv to have the most

frequent words of the different word classes, one at a time.

The resulting lists (Tables 6 – 9) show nouns and verbs, KWIC options, which need to be

selected by the teachers according to the relevance of the vocabulary in the syllabus and the

connection with the lessons’ contents. The data should be mediated by the teacher (McCarthy’s,

2

004), so learners can read and handle the concordance lines without difficulties to discover

language patterns (Johns, 1990; Schmidt, 1990) and notice their meaning (Rutherford, 1987).

Table 6. Most frequent nouns in COREL-GEO.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

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Table 7. Most frequent verbs in COREL-GEO.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

Table 8. Most frequent nouns in COREL-SCI.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

Table 9. Most frequent verbs in COREL-SCI.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

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6

.2 KWIC tool

The concordance lines are produced using the KWIC tool, the easiest tool to handle of them

all. Once teachers select the content word to be dealt with in the classroom, they left-click the

KWIC tool on the header and insert it in the appropriate slot on the left next to Search. Just clicking

search the lines are yielded instantly showing the KWIC in red at the center. Screenshots of two

samples, ‘Earth’ and ‘live’ are below in Tables 10 and 11. The concordance lines can be handled in

assorted ways in the classroom. They suit learners mainly from 3rd and 4th grades onwards, when

most of them are probably already familiar with digital gadgets like tablets and phones. The

teacher has at her disposal an array of ways to explore the KWIC tool for pedagogical reasons, for

example, she can enlarge, print the list, cut out the lines and distribute to each learner, so they

can work out a definition of the planet Earth in small groups; or individual learners can look for

other words they already know and create new sentences related to planet Earth. Learners can

also look for adjectives on the left side which qualify Earth, and also extract information for the

description of Earth, names of planets, and so on. It will depend on the learners’ grades and their

syllabus. To round off the work, the teacher can show some concordance lines she had previously

selected which have meaningful information for the group.

Table 10. Screenshot of KWIC Earth from COREL-GEO.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

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Table 11. Screenshot of KWIC live from COREL-GEO.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

Concordance line #19 in Table 11 above has the word Capybaras, which is well known by

Brazilians and could be explored in a class about animals and their behavior. The most meaningful

advantage of using concordance lines from a pedagogic corpus is that the language is not only

authentic but also at the appropriate level for learners. The concordance lines in Table 12 below

have information about the Amazon biome and they can be worked with to prompt a discussion

about the Amazon region with the 3rd and 4th graders, for example. The learners can look for the

meaning of biome, very similar to Portuguese, and guess a definition. Other words scattered in

the lines can also be made salient (Rutherford, 1987) with students looking for their definitions.

Or else, they can speculate about the different animals which live in different biomes.

Table 12. Excerpt with the top five concordance lines about the Amazon biome.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

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6

.3 GraphColl tool

A third tool, GraphColl, usually catches the attention of users in the #LancsBox. It enables them to

visualize the collocates of the node chosen and the degree of mutual strength indicated by their

positions in the Graph. The stronger the link, the closer to the node the collocate is in the graph.

One example is the graph of ‘live’ below (Table 13). The visualization helps the user to

identify the closest collocates (e.g. ‘animals live’, ‘live in forests’) which are listed in Table 14 below.

The table also displays the value of the selected association measure in Stats column, while Freq

(

coll) displays the frequency of the collocation (combination of node + collocate) and Freq

corpus) the frequency of the collocate anywhere in the corpus.

(

Table 13. Graphcoll of ‘live’ with the 64 strongest collocations in the corpus COREL-GEO.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

The node ‘live’ was selected and the Span was changed to 3<>3 (Table 14 in the header) words to

each side of the node, so that we have only the strongest collocations with it. The R (right) and L

(left) indicate the position in relation to the node in the concordance lines.

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Table 14. The 20 strongest collocations of ‘live’ in the corpus COREL-GEO.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

6

.4 Ngrams tool

A fourth tool used was Ngrams to generate the word clusters (Table 15). In this example,

we chose to have the program generate 3-gram sequences. Since an n-gram is a contiguous

sequence of n items that come from a text or a corpus, some of them, though frequent, may not

be pedagogically relevant. Even if the clusters deemed most useful for the learners are not the

most frequent, teachers should choose at their discretion those more meaningful to their class. In

Table 15 the first two more frequent n-grams are used for instruction ‘answer the questions’ and

‘

read the text’ which are quite often used in class and may not need to be highlighted.

Table 15. Screenshot of the most frequent 3-grams multi-word clusters.

Source: COREL-GEO + COREL-SCI.

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Other n-grams, such as, ‘the text and’ and ‘part of the’ are phrase fragments that would

not be relevant to be taught. However, the prepositional phrases ‘in the world’ and ‘of the world’

as well as the verb phrase ‘made up of’ (Table 16) would be useful for young learners. Groups of

words which contain prepositions are usually those to present difficulties in the future when

learners are speaking. If they are exposed to them in context, the prepositions can be internalized

appropriately from start.

Table 16. 3-gram ‘made up of’ in the corpus COREL-GEO + COREL-SCI.

Source: COREL - GEO+SCI.

Young learners will certainly benefit from handling the lines, distributed in small batches to

each one, to identify what comes after ‘made up o’, for example. Is it always a noun? Can they

categorize what kind of noun it is? Once they identify the noun, learners can create lists under

categories such: abstract, concrete, related to people, related to things, and so on. Once done,

they can create sentences using elements in the classroom or in their backpacks, or even in their

homes.

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7

. Comparison between BNC2014-baby corpora and COREL_GEO+SCI

Many researchers admit that adult corpora are too difficult for young learners to use

(Anthony, 2007) or, in the author’s view, most of their contents are above the language level of

young learners and also more diversified in relation to topics. This would probably yield query

results that are not related to learners` questions. Table 17 below shows the difference between

BCN2014-baby contents, one of the smallest adult corpus already embedded in #LancsBox 6.0,

and the pedagogic corpus COREL-GEO+SCI. Even though BCN2014-baby has fewer files, the mean

number of words indicate the texts are longer and probably more complex.

Table 17. Comparison between two corpora.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

In Table 18, the difference in the lists of most frequent words outputted from both corpora

is clear. Although some words are present in both lists, such as function words (the, of, to, etc.),

some are not the same. This is an indication of the wider scope of topics in BNC2014-baby, yielding

a general frequency list which does not present any content words (nouns, verbs or adjectives)

among the 23 most frequent words in the corpus. On the other hand, the COREL-GEO-SCI frequent

word list carries nouns such as ‘animals’ and ‘plants’.

Table 18. Comparison of most frequent words in both corpus.

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Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

In Table 19, the difference between the two lists of most common nouns is considerable as

the COREL-GEO+SCI has a specific focus on Geography and Science lexis for elementary grades,

making this corpus much more appropriate and meaningful to the young learners’ goals in the

classroom. The situation changes when we analyze the most common verbs in both corpora as

there are many similar verbs in both lists (Table 20). Once teachers are more skilled with the tools,

they can resort to comparing different corpora lists and enhance the contents of their lessons.

After all, learners will probably be exposed to all of them in their general English classes.

Table 19. Screenshot of most frequent nouns in both corpora.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

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Table 20. Screenshot of most frequent verbs in both corpora.

Source: #LancsBox 6.0.

Remarks and conclusion

This paper has intended to raise readers’ awareness of the meaningful use of pedagogic

corpora and #LancsBox, a freely available concordancer, to expose young learners to authentic

subject-informed English in the classrooms. It described the steps into getting started with user-

friendly concordancer tools to access language from the corpora, exposing learners to one of the

2

1^s^tcentury digital media that addresses language learning challenges.

It also showed the relevance of creating a pedagogic corpus targeted at a specific

discourse community of young learners. The language output presented in Section 6 should

encourage teachers to work with authentic level-appropriate subject-specific subsets of corpora

that can be used in materials design (McCarthy, 2004). To succeed, Jablonkai (2022, p.474)

recommends the involvement of “subject- specialist informants in the corpus building process

especially for future pedagogically motivated specialized corpora” to inform teaching on a wider

scale.

Until that moment in the future, this paper has been an attempt to motivate teachers to

start getting acquainted with the web environment as much as they do in their daily lives using

the mobile devices for different purposes. The digital tools and websites available can make

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education more inclusive while targeting at much broader types of student populations, helping

students with learning difficulties, etc. (Meunier, 2020). However, with content of various subjects

being taught in English to young learners, the use of pedagogic corpora with the support of

specific software, such as #LancsBox, can speed up both content and language learning.

In times of great cultural awareness and the need for social equity and inclusion in regular

schools, English and digital literacy can be the key elements to help reduce the educational

differences our youngsters experience while attending the primary school years. This

empowerment in the use of digital technologies can “enhance accessibility and inclusion,

differentiation and personalisation, and learners’ active engagement (Meunier, 2022, p.350). A

better prepared and skilled young adult will certainly stand a better chance to succeed and be

prepared to seek further opportunities in the future.

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