Week 7 : 📕 Modal Auxiliary in British English: A corpus-based study of modality through British national corpus 📘

       
         This week I study  "Modal Auxiliary in British English: A corpus-based study of modality through British national corpus" paper was written by Kriangkrai Vathanalaoha that three modal verbs (must", "should" and "have to") will be investigated through the British National Corpus web-based program (BNCweb) to illicit their grammatical differences and usage in English. This paper will introduce some background of the British National Corpus and subsequently review universal perception of modal auxiliaries in application of the BNCweb to the modal verbs focused, the findings reveal that these modal verbs are differently used in means of context and discourse.

         
    ✅ Objective 

                   1. shed some light on modal verbs of which meaning are difficult to make distinction on theoretical background.
                   2. affirm that modalities can be interchangeable due to different context, such as gender, type of data, perceived level of difficulty.

     💡 Methods

                     
                    Three modal verbs ("should", "have to","must") will be scrutinized by available functions (distribution, collocation and concordance) via BNCweb in order to offer empirical information, such as grammatical usage and discursive practice, of modalities in British context. Details of methodology in each function will be subsequently explained in results and discussion section.

                    BNCweb is a useful device to explore practical usage in English language. Besides common grammatical knowledge, collocates can give new insight and broaden our point of view. Modal verb "must", "have to" and "should" have been explained in theoretical usage in many textbooks and sometimes each one has been exemplified by unrealistic examples. Through application of BNCweb, collocates can elucidate unforeseen patterns that co-occur with each modal verb and this will assist, at least, English teachers to give realistic examples to students from the top list of collocates.

Week 6 : 💡 Corpus for Classrooms: Ideas for Material Design 💡

             From I read research Corpus for Classrooms: Ideas for Material Design was written by Neveen Al Saeed & Salma Waly that this study is about two researchers aim at highlighting several ways through which corpora can be integrated in language classrooms to teach students of various levels. The first part of the paper is a brief review of literature that mainly aims at showing how other researchers went about using corpora in their language classrooms and how effective that was. The researchers also point out other elements that affect the use of corpus such as the role of the teacher and the challenges that face both students when using corpora. As for the second part of the paper, the researchers present a number of idea for planning corpus-based activities. Those activities are tailored so that they meet the different language abilities of students in L2 classrooms. The researchers will demonstrate how vocabulary,grammar, idiomatic expressions and pragmatic constraints could be covered in EFL classrooms using corpus-based resources.


                                    👉 Literature review 👈

              Corpora have a very big potential in language classrooms. It has been proven that corpus is beneficial but there are certain challenges that any teacher needs to keep in mind before using corpora. Both teachers and students need to be properly trained on how to use corpora. It is the role of the teacher to simplify corpus findings at the beginning until students get a better understanding of how to screen their corpus findings and analyze them. Otherwise, the process will become very confusing . One of the challenges that have been discussed in the previous review is the fact that designing corpus-based activities is difficult. In addition, it is very beneficial that teachers have ideas about these activities. 

👍 Corpus-based Activities and Ideas for Material Design 👍

💬 Elementary student : Collocations: make/do

• Verb pairing game : The teacher highlights some collocations to the students. And then, students divided into two groups. Group 1 will have corpus-derived sentences without the verb make and do. Group 2 will have the verb make and do. Student stand in lines facing each other the ones carrying verb will take turns trying to pair their verb with the sentence to other group has.

• Computer cloze activity : Computer cloze activities might be used to help students practice the uses of both verbs and to learn their collocations. 

Examples : 1. The little boy, Zohair, was sent to______coffee.

                   2. I remember coming back from school and before you could _____________ homework or go out to play there were always chores to do.

• Screen shot analysis

💭Intermediate students: Modal verbs💭

• Contextual Analysis : They should try to analyze the context of each to see why one modal verb is used rather than the other.

• Cloze activities : Students will be given a worksheet with some sentences from a certain corpus. Modal verbs will be e deleted. They have to fill in the blanks with the modal verb they think is most appropriate to use.

• Spot the error activity : Students will be given a worksheet that includes a number of sentences with wrong modal verbs. They try to spot the error and decide on the best modal verb to use in each sentence .

• Multiple-choices 

👍 Upper intermediate students: Phrasal verbs 👍

• Cloze activity

Examples: 1. The little girl said that when she _______, she wanted to be a flight attendant.

                  2. I ________ very well with my sister-we spend a lot of time together.



💙 Advanced students: Idiomatic Expression 💙

• Concordance Analysis
• Pragmatics: Situation analysis : students are introduced to the different uses and meanings apologies.

Week 5 : 📂 Corpora and Translation & Thai False Friends 📁

        👀    Types of corpora as translation resources 
                              1. monolingual corpora
                              2. comparable corpora
                              3. parallel corpus


         👉   Uses
                    -Identifying words that go together
                              -Identifying specialized terms
                              -Learning about grammar

                              -Learning about style

                              -Learning about concepts

         💙  Use of monolingual, general corpus in translation

                    -Understanding meaning, connotation, idiom, expression in source texts and transferability of those features into target texts.

                            -Avoiding problems of ‘false friends’

                            -Investigating collocation and pattern 

   💬  Benefits of comparable corpora

                   -Check typical equivalence in the target language.

                   -Understand content information

                   -Study style

          👍   Benefits of parallel corpora

                     -Find equivalence in the target text.

                            -Study pattern and use in the target text.

                            -Study style that is associated with a text type or genre.

               

                                💢 Thai False Friends 💢
  
         Thai False Friends mean word or phrase in one language that write or pronounce sound similar to another language but different meaning such as "gift" in English means a present but in German means poison
             Moreover False Friends  mean  word or phrase that borrow from other language , use meaning differ from original meaning  such as "super" in English means excellent, special but when it use in Thai is means a supermarket.
    

Examples:
        

                air (n)                                        แอร์                               air-conditioner / air hostess 

                cheer (v)                                   เชียร์                              support 

                contact (n)                             คอนแทค                          contact lens 

                diet (n)                                     ไดเอ็ท                            to be on a diet 

               entrance (n)                        สอบเอนทรานซ์                    to sit for a university entrance exam                 fan (n)                                       แฟน                               boyfriend / girlfriend

Week 4: 📗 Using Corpus Analysis Software to Analyse Specialized Texts 📙

         👉 What is a corpus?

                              Corpus is a collection of texts in a computer-readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software.

             💬   Sources of language corpora

           -You can subscribe to a large corpus provider such as The British National Corpus (BNC)
                 -Use web concordancing 
                 -Use corpus analysis software such as Antconc, Wordsmith and Paraconc etc.

          
              💭  Sources of specialized texts
                       -Printed materials
                                  -Word document texts
                                  -CD-ROMs
                                  -Texts on the Web
                                  -Online databases


       👌  Getting start with Antconc
    
                          Start by Run the programe then, Open file or Open Dir . After that you choose the function and click Clear All Tools and Files before selecting opening new files. The last you click Save Output to text Files to save output such as concordance lines.


                  From I used Antconc to analyze that makes me know about pattern of some word or grammar, collocations and every form of each word, some word has many meaning such as 
very + adj. , like + to +v.1+ , like means "to be similar to" and "in the same way"

Week 3 : 💻 The Use of Multimedia in English Teaching 📟

• The definition of Multimedia

           Multimedia is the use several media for instant, text, graphic, video, animation and sound in an integrated way in one computer.

• Advantages of Multimedia

            - Arousing the students interest : teachers should try their best to get students to become interest in one topic of knowledge point and make the students with a strong passion and enthusiasm to participate in teaching.

                - Improving student's self-learning ability. : the most important thing is teaching students how to learn and making students change from "want me to study" to " I want to learn" in thinking from passive learning to active Learning.

                - Improving students' innovative ability.

                - Cultivating students' communication skills.

                - Increasing classroom capacity.

• Disadvantage of Multimedia

                - Performance on behalf of the lead : Teacher addict multimedia and use multimedia instead of them self. Moreover, students really pay attention to appreciating the pictures and do not pay attention to what they should really master in the classroom.

                - Lack of spatial skills : because of lack of proficient operation of multimedia, some teachers waste certain time in the operation the computer, the unskilled operation on computer would affect the instruction flow ,which in turn would de-motive students if it happend frequently in class.

               - Over-use of multimedia : if teachers act as only information given to the students that they have no chance to have content thinking, critical thinking and creative thinking of the teachers' lecture.

               - Lack of interaction between teachers and students : is no eye contact, ask and answer to each other.

• Strategies for using multimedia

               - Combining Modern Teaching Method with Traditional Teaching Methods.

               - Viewing Multimedia as the Assistance to Teaching.

               - Building the Ideal relationship between teachers and students.

               - Strengthening Teacher Training.