Watch out! The corpus, verb usage and non-native teachers of English

For non-native teachers of English (especially in Japanese high schools), questions of appropriate English usage and possibility are constant. Although corpora usage has widely been discussed as a useful tool for EFL students, this paper discusses the possibility of corpus-usage for non-native EFL instructors in answering questions of usage and helping prepare material for classrooms. Using the online British National Corpus, a simple step-by-step methodology for teachers searching words with shared meaning and usage was presented. Analysis of the search results shows that although corpus results are often complex and require time to sufficiently analyze, corpus studies can help clarify usage and meaning questions. The paper discusses the problems of motivation with using the corpus and discusses possibilities for improving teacher motivation for using corpus studies.