#10 | Data-Driven Learning with Corpora

    Hello everyone!!!!! 

 

   Today we are going to talk about “corpus”.

   If you're unfamiliar with this concept, imagine a vast archive that encompasses all written texts and transcribed recordings of speech. You can find various corpora according to your purpose: to see authentic talk, to observe fine-tuned text, to practice grammar, or to see a certain word in a sentence. When you are not sure about a phrase and its use, a corpus becomes handy by showing every sentence containing the word you are looking for.

   We were given a task to prepare material where students would use the corpus themselves. Generally, the corpus in the classroom gives students freedom and responsibility for their language learning as they embrace a “researcher” role to find out grammatical patterns or meanings of words and phrases.

   I and my friends Eylül and İlayda prepared our material according to this inductive learning approach.

   Our topic is “Idioms with Clothes”. We chose this topic from ‘Unit-10, Shopping’ from a 10th-grade English book. In the curriculum, there were a couple of expressions related to clothing, such as ‘dress to kill’, and we wanted to show students more of them to help their fluency and facilitate their understanding of authentic materials.

• In the first activity, we wanted to test students’ knowledge of the given idioms by making them guess their meanings.
• In the second activity, before making students use the corpus, we explained how to use it. Students are supposed to read the results in each expression, find the meaning through the contexts, and then match them accordingly.
• In the third activity, we wanted to test students’ understanding by making them fill in the blanks and making students practice with teacher-mediated corpus use.
• In the fourth activity, to ensure learning, students are asked to write the sentence that made them sure about the meaning they guessed.
• And, in the last one, students have to use the expressions they learned.

   Also, we prepared a lesson plan according to the ASSURE Model for this material.

   Using Corpus and Canva for this task was a wonderful experience; we had so much fun while experiencing the process ourselves, and we believe students will also love this kind of engagement. However, this material is not perfect, and the nature of the classroom may hinder the process. For instance, this activity is based on the use of a website, an internet connection, the absence of tools to use the corpus, and a power outage can be some of the physical problems. Apart from that, students’ understanding of the process will set the pace. If they don’t show interest, this material cannot achieve its main goal, active student learning.

 

   Take care, see you in the next post!!!