View Content #18990

< Go Back
TitleUsing a Corpus for Inductive Teaching and Learning
SourceCASLS Activity of the Week
Body

by Patricia Roldán Marcos, CASLS Graduate Teaching Fellow for Curriculum

Two weeks ago Robert Poole shared an activity on academic language that was closely linked to this week's Topic of the Week on register, so have a look here if you're looking for a lesson on that topic. This week we're sharing a sequence of activities that can be used with any level and language group. The examples provided are in Spanish, but they could be easily adapted to fit your context. For example, in English your students could look up different functions of "yet."

Objectives:

  • Students will be able to use a corpus effectively to look up problematic expressions.
  • Students will be able to analyze the concordances found in the corpus and discuss different functions of the target expression.
  • Students will be able to write a dialogue exemplifying two different functions of an expression or chunk.

Resources: Using a Corpus for Inductive Teaching and Learning

Procedure:

Part 1 – Explore:

  1. Day 1 – In class: Get students to answer question 1 in pairs. Ask them to report some ideas to the class and then spend some time showing them how to use the corpus (www.corpusdelespanol.org). You can look up one of the examples they came up with. Make sure you tell them about the different options for searching and go through more examples if necessary.
  2. Set the homework for the next class (activities 2-5) and clarify any questions. They should fill in the chart for the next lesson. Note: if students can work on computers individually, the whole lesson could be done in class, but you'd need to allow enough time for students to analyze their findings before checking in pairs or reporting back. Therefore, it may be more time efficient to set it as homework.

Part 2 – Analyze:

  1. Day 2 – In class: Get students to work in pairs to share and discuss their findings.
  2. Ask some pairs to report to the class and analyze the chunks by eliciting ideas and functions from students.

Part 3 – Extend:

  1. Get students to work in pairs and come up with a situation where they could include their target expression twice, but with different functions.
  2. Ask students to write a dialogue exemplifying that situation and then get them to create a comic strip. Show them different websites to choose from to create comic strips.
  3. Alternatively, you could get students to combine their two expressions or chunks in the dialogue.
  4. If time allows, get each pair to present their comic to the rest of the class, as they'll probably have the same kind of problems with the language, so they could benefit from seeing examples of their use and analyze their function.

 

Here are some tools to create comic strips: http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/, http://www.toondoo.com/, http://stripgenerator.com/, http://www.pixton.com/

Publishdate2015-02-16 09:30:29