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.