Petter Hagen Karlsen

• Karlsen, Petter Hagen & Nacey, Susan Lee (2026). Pedagogical applications of learner corpora: A decade in review. In Farr, Fiona & Murray, Liam (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language learning and technology. Routledge. ISSN 9780415837873. p. 401–416. doi: 10.4324/9781003412212-32. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This chapter presents a systematic review of the pedagogical applications of learner corpora as reported in the learner corpus research (LCR) literature

• Rørvik, Sylvi; Davies, Rebecca Sioned; Karlsen, Petter Hagen; Monsen, Marte & Steien, Guri (2026). Transforming Campus into Practice: Collective Peer Teaching in Norwegian Teacher Education. Nordic Journal of Language Teaching and Learning (NJLTL). 14(1), p. 41–64. doi: 10.46364/njltl.v14i1.1581. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article reports on student perceptions of a peer-teaching experiment in three courses in Norwegian teacher education. The course design resulted from a desire to increase the level of student activity and provide students with teaching practice during on-campus sessions, partially as a result of the current debate about “too much academization” and “not enough practice” in Norwegian teacher education. Survey data were collected from a total of 51 student respondents, who had all been peer teachers, students exposed to their peers’ teaching, and observers of their peers’ teaching. The survey questions explored their perceptions of the usefulness and learning outcome of this approach. The degree of satisfaction with the design varied between the groups, but in general the responses from the majority of students ranged from neutral to very positive. Group sizes and the contents of the individual courses may have influenced student perceptions, as may the degree of scaffolding, but in general the experiment may be judged a cautious success and an approach that may fruitfully be developed further.

• Farr, Fiona & Karlsen, Petter Hagen (2025). Pedagogies of Practice in English Language Teacher Education: Student Teachers’ Experiences and Preferences. Language Teaching Research Quarterly. ISSN 2667-6753. 51, p. 408–408. doi: 10.32038/ltrq.2025.51.11. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper discusses the ways in which (English) language teachers are supported in their preparation for professional practice during their teacher education programmes. Using the framework of pedagogies of practice (representations, decompositions and approximations) (Grossman et al. 2009), it surveys 26 student teachers in relation to their experiences of the practice-oriented components of their teacher education programmes to discern their experiences, practices and perceptions. It specifically explores the context of Ireland and Norway. These opportunities to engage in practice, whether individually or collectively, assessed or unassessed, are discussed in terms of their potential for meaningful reflective practice (Dewey 1933). The results suggest that these students have opportunities to engage in a wide array of pedagogies of practice during their teacher education programmes, both individually and collectively. Many of these are assessed but others are formative in nature. Both groups of students place very high value on these practice-engagement elements of their programmes, with this value and preference increasing the closer these activities move towards real classroom practice, which is the most highly prized of all. Implications and suggestions are included in the concluding remarks.

• Farr, Fiona Brid & Karlsen, Petter Hagen (2025). From practice to practice: reflective practice in language teacher education as a stepping stone to professional practice and CPD. Language Learning Journal. ISSN 0957-1736. p. 1–16. doi: 10.1080/09571736.2025.2585866. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  There has been a growing demand among student teachers for an increase in the practical components of teacher education programmes, particularly in academic settings. This includes a desire for more practice-based activities, such as observations and micro-teaching, as well as more authentic teaching experiences as part of a teaching placement in school settings. As a profession of teacher educators, it behoves us to investigate such activities to better understand how to effectively integrate them, as they represent a significant resource investment for the institutions involved. One dimension of this understanding comes in the form of uncovering student teachers’ perceptions of the practice-oriented undertakings they experience during their teacher education. To that end, the research reported in this paper aims to examine the opinions of student teachers in relation to these practice elements using a pedagogies of practice framework (Grossman et al. Citation2009) as well as uncovering their perceived predicted levels of engagement in CPD after graduation. A survey of student teachers undertaking English language teaching programmes in Ireland and Norway provides the data for this study, which shows very high preferences for the more authentic practice experiences as well as a widespread commitment to specific CPD activities post-qualification.

• Farr, Fiona & Karlsen, Petter Hagen (2022). DDL pedagogy, participants, and perspectives. In Jablonkai, Reka R. & Csomay, Eniko (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Corpora and English Language Teaching and Learning. Routledge. ISSN 9780367433956. p. 329–343. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The chapter covers the perspectives of learners and teachers who use corpus-based approaches to language learning. We briefly summarize data-driven learning approaches reported from pedagogic contexts before exploring their perceived affordances and complexities. Following this, a recent empirical case-study is presented from the Norwegian secondary school context, exploring teacher and student perspectives.

• Karlsen, Petter Hagen (2021). Educational Roles in Corpus-Based Education: From Shift to Diversification. Nordic Journal of Language Teaching and Learning (NJLTL). 9(1). doi: 10.46364/njltl.v9i1.833. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This study discusses the educational roles afforded by the use of linguistic corpora as a teaching tool in pre-tertiary education and explores upper secondary students’ opinions and experiences of educational roles following corpus-based lessons. The data were collected through group interviews of 20 students following a two-week period where the students’ regular English teacher collaborated with the researcher/author to plan and implement a corpus-based approach in two first-year upper secondary school classes. The interview subjects were selected from the 69 total students across the two classes based on the teacher’s recommendations and the researcher’s observations throughout the implementation period. The results show that during the largely student-centered, corpus-based approach, students felt that the teacher was absent and unengaging at times, but that they were used to “self-study” in his lessons. The students also wanted more variation in the approaches taken by their teacher beyond purely student-centered ones. This paper advocates for a diversification of educational roles where both teachers and learners adopt and change between different roles depending on the particular situation. At the same time, the call for role shifts in the corpus-based education literature is criticized in favor of a change in discourse toward one of role diversification.

• Karlsen, Petter Hagen & Monsen, Marte (2020). Corpus Literacy and Applications in Norwegian Upper Secondary Schools: Teacher and Learner Perspectives. Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES). ISSN 1502-7694. 19(1), p. 118–148. doi: 10.35360/njes.500. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This study explores corpus literacy and pedagogical corpus applications among in-service teachers who have corpus linguistics in their educational background, along with their students of English in upper secondary school in Norway. In order to investigate the multifaceted nature of educational practice, the study took a wide perspective encompassing aspects of digitalization in education, general pedagogy, and corpus linguistics. The students (n=154) answered an online questionnaire and four teachers were interviewed. The data are discussed in light of a technology integration framework that takes into account teacher knowledge, resource availability, teacher beliefs, as well as student epistemologies. Findings show little to no corpus literacy among the students, with the exception of one student. The interviews show that the teachers have largely avoided corpora in their teaching practice. One reason why the teachers chose to do so was due to inaccessibility related to paywalls, registration requirements and functionality restrictions. Other potential reasons that were uncovered were tied to their perception of learner competencies, how the affordances of corpora fit their curricular focus, and how their epistemic beliefs about language learning influenced their choices.

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• Karlsen, Petter Hagen & Rørvik, Sylvi (2025). Do English textbooks in Norwegian upper-secondary school contain appropriate input to prepare pupils for academic writing? Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In the Norwegian school system, pupils have a choice between vocational and general-studies programs in upper-secondary school. The program for specialization in general studies is intended to prepare pupils to enter university-level education. Within this program, English is obligatory as a subject only in the first of the three years, but pupils can choose to continue with the subject in the second and third year as well. Thus, the third-year subject, called “English 2” in the most recent national curriculum, represents the highest level of instruction in English before students transition to tertiary education. It is therefore of considerable interest to examine the extent to which this subject prepares pupils for the academic register they will encounter in higher education, and indeed one of the competence aims for the course specifically address this, in that pupils are expected to be able to “produce different types of oral and written academic texts with defined content, and appropriate style and structure” (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, n.d.). In this poster presentation we aim to investigate the extent to which commonly-used textbooks for the English-2 subject contain input that is appropriate to help pupils achieve this competence aim. It has been shown that one of the main features distinguishing written academic language from speech (and indeed most other registers) is a condensed style resulting from complex noun modification instead of clausal elaboration (Biber et al 2011), and that it takes time for novice writers to acquire this register feature (cf. e.g. Parkinson & Musgrave 2014, Staples et al 2016). A study of Norwegian pupils has revealed that there is little evidence to indicate that they acquire such phrasal complexity in lower-secondary school (Rørvik 2022), and yet it has been shown that explicit instruction can help novice writers to master more complex forms of noun modification (Bychovska 2021). Thus, we aim to answer the following research question: To what extent do the texts included in English-2 textbooks contain complex noun phrases, and how sophisticated is the modification employed? To measure the sophistication, noun phrases will be analyzed using the framework introduced in Biber et al (2011), with the modifications outlined in Rørvik (2022). References Biber, D., B. Gray, & K. Poonpon. 2011. “Should We Use Characteristics of Conversation to Measure Grammatical Complexity in L2 Writing Development?” TESOL Quarterly, 45:1, 5-35. Bychkovska, T. (2021). Effects of explicit instruction on noun phrase production in L2 undergraduate writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 54, 1-16. Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training. Competence aims and assessment. Competence aims after English 2. https://www.udir.no/lk20/eng04-02/kompetansemaal-og-vurdering/kv301?lang=eng Accessed February 18, 2025. Parkinson, J. & J. Musgrave. 2014. “Development of noun phrase complexity in the writing of English for Academic Purposes students.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 14, 48-59. Rørvik, S. 2022. “Noun-phrase complexity in the texts of intermediate-level Norwegian EFL writers: stasis or development?” Nordic Journal of Language Teaching and Learning 10(2), 298-326. Staples, S., J. Egbert, D. Biber, & B. Gray. 2016. “Academic Writing Development at the University Level: Phrasal and Clausal Complexity Across Level of Study, Discipline, and Genre.” Written Communication 33(2), 149-183.

• Karlsen, Petter Hagen & Nacey, Susan Lee (2024). Pedagogical applications of learner corpus research: How far have we come? Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper presents a systematic review of the pedagogical applications of learner corpora as reported in the learner corpus research (LCR) literature between 2014-2023 – roughly the last decade. Our research question is the following: “What are the characteristics and trends of LCR over the last decade with respect to pedagogical applications?” Since the inception of LCR in the late 1980s, the field has been held to have great potential for positive impact in the language classroom not only through affording a richer understanding of foreign language learning and development, but also through contributing towards both the enhancement of pedagogical materials and the creation of data-driven learning opportunities (see Meunier, 2016). Yet Granger (2015) found that “pedagogical ‘implications’ are much more numerous than ‘applications’” in the research literature (p.487), while Gilquin writes as late as 2023 that learner corpora “have not played a central role in learner teaching so far” (p. 283). Our paper reviews all relevant LCR publications identified though a targeted search of research databases, together with corpus linguistics journals. We identify 487 peer-reviewed publications reporting empirical LCR findings, using their abstracts to code them for factors including corpus type (written, spoken, multimodal, cross-sectional, longitudinal, translation) and application type. Our four application types lie along a continuum of learners’ and/or teachers’ interaction with learner data: publications detailing 1) theoretical contributions alone (knowledge production), 2) pedagogical implications of knowledge production, 3) indirect applications of learner corpora (e.g. dictionary development), and 4) direct applications of learner corpora (e.g. classroom activities). Our overall findings show a greater emphasis in LCR publications on knowledge production than on transfer of that knowledge into educational practice, similar to earlier observations. That said, we also find some exemplary pieces of research that represent intriguing avenues for classroom relevant LCR and future directions for the field. References: Gilquin, G. (2023). Written learner corpora to inform teaching. In The Routledge Handbook of Corpora and English Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 281-295). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003002901-25 Granger, S. (2015). The contribution of learner corpora to reference and instructional materials design. In The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research (pp. 485-510). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139649414.022 Meunier, F. (2016). Learner corpora and pedagogical applications. In The Routledge Handbook of Language Learning and Technology (pp. 376-387). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315657899-41

• Rørvik, Sylvi; Karlsen, Petter Hagen; Monsen, Marte; Davies, Rebecca Sioned & Steien, Guri (2024). Forsøk med hverandreundervisning (GLU og lektor). Full text in Research Archive
• Karlsen, Petter Hagen & Rørvik, Sylvi (2024). Subject-Verb Agreement in English Learner Texts: A Pseudo-Longitudinal Perspective. Full text in Research Archive
• Karlsen, Petter Hagen & Rørvik, Sylvi (2023). Subject-Verb Agreement in English Learner Texts: A Pseudo-longitudinal Perspective. Full text in Research Archive
• Karlsen, Petter Hagen (2021). Using Multimedia Corpora with Upper Secondary School Students. Full text in Research Archive
• Karlsen, Petter Hagen (2021). Integrating multimedia corpora in the secondary school classroom. Full text in Research Archive
• Karlsen, Petter Hagen (2019). Corpus Literacy in the Upper Secondary Classroom: Teacher and Learner Perspectives. Full text in Research Archive
• Karlsen, Petter Hagen (2018). Presentation of my research project: Idea, research questions and method. Full text in Research Archive
• Karlsen, Petter Hagen (2021). Teaching and Learning English through Corpus-based Approaches in Norwegian Secondary Schools: Identifying Obstacles and a Way Forward. Universitetet i Innlandet. ISSN 9788283803020. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This doctoral dissertation presents the use of corpus-based approaches to English language learning in upper secondary school in Norway. The research was conducted in two distinct phases. The first phase investigated the pedagogic corpus work of four corpus-trained, in service teachers and their students’ corpus literacy alongside factors that might have influenced this work. Data were collected through a questionnaire to students and teacher interviews. The second phase featured a teacher-researcher collaboration with one of the four aforementioned teachers and two of his first-year, upper-secondary classes to design and implement a corpu-based approach over a two-week period. Data were collected through a case-study design with classroom observations, and subsequent student group interviews. Previous studies have shown that corpus-based approaches to language learning result in positive learning outcomes; however, most studies are at the tertiary level and designed and conducted by corpus scholars. Meanwhile, data-driven learning in secondary school is “relatively uncharted territory” (Wicher, 2020) and there has been a call for more qualitative studies. The current dissertation sought to contribute knowledge of data-driven learning in the secondary-school context and insight into the processes and opinions of teachers and learners related to pedagogic corpus use. In the first phase, it was found that the teachers, despite their formal corpus training, had avoided corpus-based approaches in their practice, and few of their students knew anything about corpora. Factors such as teachers’ beliefs about their students’ digital and linguistic competence and about corpora, teachers’ topic focus and epistemic beliefs, and the inaccessibility and cost of corpus applications contributed to their reluctance to introducing their students to corpora. In the second phase, several opportunities for learning were found including instances of metatalk to describe corpus data, peer scaffolding where students helped each other to learn the tool, and teacher scaffolding where the teacher confronted the students with their socio-economic prejudices that arose while working with corpus data from Irish English speakers. However, students’ impressions of the tool and process were negatively skewed. Their critique focused on the absence of the teacher, the complexity and aesthetics of the corpus tool’s interface and data, and the tool’s irrelevance to their learning process. In addition to the empirical contributions described above, it is argued in the dissertation that there are two major obstacles to data-driven learning that need to be addressed in order for its ii application to be normalized in the classroom. These obstacles concern a) the novelty of the approach and the training and mediation required to overcome this novelty, and b) the relevance of the approach to teachers, students, and the curriculum. Inquiry-based education was brought in as a theoretical framework that has considerable overlap with the concepts of data-driven learning but includes a more pronounced social dimension that foster teacher and peer mediation, collaborative learning, and knowledge sharing.

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