Teachers and Englishes: Using Do-it-yourself Concordancing to Raise Teachers’ Awareness of Linguistic Diversity

Jarosław KRAJKA

Abstract

Since insufficient attention has been devoted to putting teachers in the role of language investigators, introducing non-standard varieties of English to the classroom and skillfully exposing students to them becomes of primary importance in teacher training nowadays. With most interactions in English happening online between non-natives, the concept of standard English is no longer as essential as it used to be. On the contrary, learners are more than likely to encounter non-standard Englishes, consequently, they need to be exposed to these in the classroom to become aware of how English changes across the world and to develop attitudes of tolerance towards, sensitivity to and appreciation of other cultures and accents.
The purpose of the paper is to reflect upon the process of raising teacher awareness of New Englishes in the graduate teacher training program. A case study will show how student teachers may be gradually introduced into New Englishes through existing corpora, text retrieval and compilation, and, finally, to do-it-yourself concordancing. The paper aims at checking how feasible for raising learners’ awareness of New Englishes two selected instructional methods: mini-corpus self-compilation and New Englishes lesson plan development, proved to be.