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Why Being Informed Matters: A Corpus-Informed Perspective on Research and Teaching
Professor Siaw-Fong Chung
Abstract:
The notion of being informed has become increasingly salient in language studies. While the term is often associated with ethical practices such as informed consent, its meaning has expanded to encompass a more conscious awareness of available knowledge, resources, and analytical possibilities. This keynote proposes being informed as an emerging conceptual orientation in both research and teaching. It involves not only knowing what decisions are made, but also knowing what is available to inform those decisions.
From a corpus-informed perspective, being informed entails awareness of the tools, resources, and types of evidence or methodology that corpora make accessible. Corpus data allow researchers and teachers to move beyond intuition and selective examples by revealing patterns of language use that are otherwise difficult to observe, including frequency, variation, co-occurrence, and pragmatic preference. To be corpus-informed, therefore, is not simply to use corpora, but to recognize how corpus tools expand what can be asked and justified.
Drawing on examples from authentic texts, learner data, and digital discourse, this talk illustrates how corpus-informed awareness reshapes both research inquiry and pedagogical practice. In research, it supports more transparent claims and theoretically grounded interpretations of language and culture. In teaching, it informs instructional decisions, materials design, classroom instruction, and learner awareness without requiring teachers to become technical specialists. Particular attention is given to how corpus evidence makes culturally embedded language use more visible and teachable.
By reframing being informed as conscious awareness of available evidence and analytical tools, this keynote argues for a corpus-informed orientation that bridges research and teaching and supports more reflective, accountable, and evidence-aware work in language studies.
Bio:
Professor Siaw-Fong Chung is a faculty member in the Department of English at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. She received her PhD in Linguistics from National Taiwan University, following a B.Ed. (Hons) in Secondary Education and English Language Teaching from the University of Exeter, England. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Taiwan Journal of TESOL (ESCI; Scopus, 2025–2027), Associate Editor of the International Review of Pragmatics (ESCI; Scopus) and TESOL Communications, and is a member of the Editorial Board of Applied Corpus Linguistics (Scopus). She represents Taiwan in the CIPL General Assembly (2024–2028) and is the Newsletter Editor on the Executive Committee of the Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM). She previously served as the 13th President of the Linguistic Society of Taiwan (2023–2025) and now continues her service as a Supervisor of the Society. At NCCU, she directed the EMI Resource Center and later the Bilingual Education and Multicultural Promotion Office until July 2025, and she was Chairperson of the Department of English from 2022 to 2024. Her research spans corpus linguistics, near-synonymy, and digital discourse, with a recent focus on social media language from a corpus-based perspective. She also leads a research team dedicated to corpus-based studies.
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