Week#7 Corpus for Classrooms

Hi guy!!! Welcome to my blog again. Today I have leaned about Corpus-based Activities and Ideas for Material Design. It is really amazing. I wonder how human can created these fun activities which very effective for English language teaching and learning? Each activities is such a good ideas. Earlier, I was so worried about How to teach students? and How to provide perfect activities to them. Today, I found that there are many ways
to teach students and I don't need to create it by myself. I can retrieve appropriate activities form those various for teaching. It is easy!!! According to the paper of Neveen AL Saeed and Salma Waly, there are many activities and various material design which support students in difference levels. But in this blogs, I will share two activities that I like the most that is Concordance Analysis and Express yourself. 

Let's start with the first activities ''Concordance Analysis'' This activities provide students to exercise their brains. The teacher have to begin with teaching students about Corpus in terms of What is Corpus? After that, introduce them to the sources of language corpora. Moreover, teacher can introduce them to the program which can help them analyze their data. To provide Concordance Analysis Activities the teacher can ask them the questions based on Corpus. For example. You can ask them to search for the idiomatic expressions and analyze the concordance lines to see how these idioms are contextualized and used by native speakers. The students will learn a lot of idioms such as "Broke" the result will shown many collocation of broke and many meaning when it is become idioms. For example:

1. Break a leg.

2. Break bread.

3. Break the mould.

4. Break a heart.

5. Break the ice.

6. Break new ground.

Moreover, Teacher can assign them to collect data according to the topic that they are interesting. After, let them analyze those data. One of the best program to do concordance analysis is AntConc. I did this activity also in my class. And I will show you as below;

The second activity is Express yourself, which is suitable for Intermediate Students. Here is an example; about using this activity to teaching modal verb. The activity start with the teacher assign the students to make up many sentences that express suggestion or obligation on small folded pieces of paper. The teacher then will write a situation on the board. Students will randomly draw pieces of paper an read the sentences on them. Some sentences will be relevant to the situation on the board and some will not. This is a fun activities that exposes students to a large number of sentences using modal verbs. Students can negotiate the meaning of the sentences and decide which can be used and which cannot.

Here is the example of situation : give your sick friend advice.

Sample sentences:

-You have to attend the meeting at 7.00 (irrelevant) X

-You should take a break. (Advice) /

-You must see a doctor. (Strong advice) /

-You should go to ask the superintendent of the cemetery (irrelevant/funny) X   

That's all for today. Thank you for visiting my blogs. See ya!!!!