CORPUS-BASED LANGUAGE TEACHING

WHAT DID WE DESIGNED AS AN EXAMPLE MATERIAL IN 4 STEPS

In this article, you will read about the material which was designed by my friend Sude and me , the process of designing, and the objectives that we pursued in the light of the corpus-based language teaching method,.

We made use of a preparatory class course book of high schools prepared by MoE while choosing the target words. That's why, both the external and the internal design of the material are chosen addressing our target audiences, which are high school pupils.

We aimed by choosing these particular words 'win' and 'earn' to make the students find out the different uses of these words which are translated into Turkish as the same. To reach that aim, in the first step, we test their guesses and prior knowledge with a matching activity as a warm-up. In the second step, we asked them to exploit a corpus website called 'Skell', which is more usable for their age and possible competence in English. Considering that, we use simple explanations and two photos of the website to show what they will come across. When they access the website and search the words one by one, they see several examples of sentences in which these words are used. after they select four of them, they note them in the two boxes allocated. With the help of sentences, we hoped that they discover the words. By getting the help of given sentences, we expected them while the activity of the third step, to circle the correct one according to the uses. As we expected them to refer to the meanings and uses, in the four first steps, we want them to practice it with a true/false activity. After finishing that activity, we added a re-discussion section to compare their new knowledge with old guesses.

When it comes to the objective of that material, our students will be able to use the corpus tool to recognize and infer the words and forms. Also, they will be able to process them by following the steps.

Of course, there can be some missing parts despite we designed it in detail. As for me, no matter how we explain the material clearly, or the tool is simpler than other tools like COCA, they can still not understand the example ordered by Skell. That is, if they cannot understand, they lose among the sentences' other items and cannot focus on the target words/forms/structure, etc.

I will share our material here. Also, if you wish ,you can check Sude's blog out.

See you soon.

Take care of yourself .🙋

Eng.BloggerTeacher

Friday 1 December 2023