Designing ELT Corpus-Based Materials Using Learner Needs

Designing English as a foreign language (EFL) materials to meet the specific needs of learners remains a challenge in the English language teaching (ELT) classroom. Although corpora provide authentic language for teachers to meet these unique needs, most corpus websites are not intuitive to teachers without training. Therefore, a need exists for an education program for EFL practitioners to learn to use and design materials with corpora. This article focuses on the findings of four EFL teachers who participated in a 2-year action research project to become corpus literate. Qualitative data from teachers’ reflective journals during the education program and post-training interviews were analysed. The findings show how the collection of their students’ needs—a critical pillar of the education program—enabled them to learn to use corpora and design corpus activities. Teachers confirmed that collecting learner needs assisted them in designing ELT materials, suggesting that future corpus literacy education programs should include this aspect. This article contributes to corpus literacy education literature by demonstrating that collecting learners’ needs helps teachers to focus when performing corpus searches, associate specific corpus tools with activity design, and select sentences for designing corpus activities.