ENGLISH LANGUAGE UNIVERSITY CURRICULA AT PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA: THE CASE OF CORPUS LINGUISTICS
Keywords:
corpus linguistics, university curricula, public universities, curricula comparisonAbstract
The literature on curricula comparison and analysis is poor in relation to literature on issues such as teaching methods, materials and student and teacher competences. The study of English language and literature is a relatively popular study at public universities across Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region. The last decades have degenerated many new aspects and theories to language teaching but unfortunately traditional English teaching seems to be the main method used. Teacher education should change and shift more towards incorporating corpus linguistics into the teaching process. Corpus linguistics as a study is not recognized in the language research community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and incorporating this particular study into university curricula may inspire future teachers and researchers to endeavour in corpus based research. By being familiar with the research and tools of corpus linguistics, future teachers may use them to critically examine their teaching process and look for answers in corpus data evidence. The aim of this review study is to compare and contrast university curricula of studies of English language and literature with special interest in corpus linguistics courses. The focus is on eight public universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We wish to find out if corpus linguistics is thought as an independent course at the university studies of the English language at public universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and compare findings with those from public universities in the Republic of Croatia and the Republic of Serbia. We visited the official sites of eight public universities in Bosnia and Hercegovina, both in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Republic of Srpska, and reviewed their curricula of English language and literature studies, both single and double major programmes of undergraduate and graduate studies, for corpus linguistics courses. We used curriculum mapping as the research method for creating and using the curriculum map, it is a visualisation of relationships within and between a curriculum or curricula. This study seeks to answer the following questions: Is corpus linguistics thought as a separate course at English language and literature studies at public universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina? Do universities in the region teach corpus linguistics as a separate course in the education of future English language teachers? The study wishes to emphasize the importance of incorporating corpus linguistics into English language teacher education in Bosnia and Herzegovina and also highlight the importance of corpus linguistics and as science and promote it among researchers, teachers and students in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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https://ling.byu.edu/english-language-ba, February, 2023
