Corpus for Classrooms: Ideas for Material Design
Neveen Al Saeed & Salma Waly
⚡ Using corpora in language classrooms is an effective tool in teaching vocabulary, grammar and language use to learners of English as a second/foreign language. EFL teachers find integrating corpus-based activities in their classrooms a challenging teaching practice. In this paper, the researchers will guide the readers on how corpora can help students understand how certain language forms are used by native speakers of English. The researchers will go through some corpus-based materials and activities suitable for different language levels.
Introduction
⚡ Corpus linguistics is one of the technology-based tools that could be very useful in teaching but still has not been widely used or tested. A lot of research has been conducted to examine the effectiveness of using corpus linguistics as a teaching technique to highlight how native speakers of English use certain language forms, vocabulary items, and expressions. For this paper is about how corpora can be integrated in language classrooms to teach students of various levels; a brief review of literature that about using corpora in language classrooms and a number of ideas for planning corpus-based activities.
Literature review
⚡ Varley (2008) carried out a study on 19 EAL students to find out if corpora help develop students' language proficiency. She investigated how corpora improve students' vocabulary and grammar. In addition, she examined the attitudes of students towards using corpora in language learning. Participants attended 4 hours of instruction each week, during the 14 weeks of the study. Two hours was about introducing students to the theoretical background of corpora. For the other two hours, students spent them in computer labs looking at corpora, learning how to use them and how to search for certain language structures. The researcher also asked the students to submit a project at the end of the study, where participants applied everything they learned about corpora and they were asked to fill out a log. Varley found out the advantages and disadvantages of corpora.
📌 helped students to learn about certain language uses that were not available in any of the traditional tools.
📌 allowed students to examine these language features in context.
📌 helped students get a broader view of language (corpora could compare spoken and written languages).
Disadvantages
📌 some corpus software is not available for students.
📌when searching any corpus, students are confused because of the large amounts of search results.
Neff et al. (2001) investigated the differences in the use of modal verbs between Spanish learners of English and native speakers of English. The researchers aimed at looking at how native and nonnative speakers use modal verbs like can, could, may, might and must.
🔴 Spanish learners seemed to use "can” and “must” more than any other modal verbs. “Can” and “must” tended to occur with the pronoun we more than any other pronoun.
The results of the study imply that many of the problems that English language learners have when acquiring English modal verbs can be attributed to discourse differences between their L1 and English.
Simpson and Mendis (2003) investigated the usefulness of corpora in acquiring idioms. They examined a 1.7 million word corpus that included academic spoken English. They found that idioms are found in corpora and that corpora could be used to design teaching materials. Researchers also argued that corpora provide students with information about the pragmatic use of idioms. Moreover, corpora provide students with authentic contexts, which means that students learn language in context and not in isolation.
Maddalena (2001) uses a corpus in order to teach his students the differences between synonymous words in English. The researcher was asked by one of his Japanese students to explain the difference between ruin and destroy. He could not fully explain the difference to her because, rather than explaining the difference in meaning, he wanted to show how the two words are used to communicate ideas.
The researcher with the help of another EFL teacher started the experiment with six-year three Japanese high school students who needed to pass a respected standardized test in Japan. The researcher used corpus concordance lines as a way to show non-native English speakers to how native speakers contextualize and use the problematic words. The Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen or the LOB was finally chosen to use with the students. The experiment consisted of five stages.
1. Students were involved in a simple exercise using a dictionary.
2. Students were asked to examine concordance lines and see how the words are used.
3. Students were given a cloze exercise.
4. Students were asked to produce sentences using these words.
5. Students had to formulate rules of using the target words.
The results of the study showed that using concordance lines was not very useful for the students. First, students were not used to such a teaching methodologies in which they are given somethingto look at and then to report on. Second, the main goal for the students was to pass the exam.
Breyer (2008) supported Maddalena's view that the teacher has a crucial role in using corpus in classrooms. Breyer concluded that teachers need to be trained on how to use corpora in their classrooms. Therefore, she carried out a study on 18 student teachers in Germany. Breyer highlighted that corpora provide both teachers and students the language in context. This will help students discuss language features more deeply in class.
Fuentes and Rokowski (2002) proposed a model for integrating corpus-based exercised in ESP classrooms. He mainly focused the Business and Information Technology which integrates ESP skills with EAP or English for Academic Purposes skills. The use of corpus in this class basically was that students need to build some kind of language competence through active task completion. The tasks of the course include a number of writing tasks and presentations. For such tasks, students need to build a repertoire of technical terms and possible collocations. Students can explore a number of words that are frequent in the field of IT. Then, they can explore the collocations of such words.
To sum up, it becomes clear that corpora have a very big potential in language classrooms. Both teachers and students need to be properly trained on how to use corpora. One of the challenges that have been discussed 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 students: Collocations: make/do
"Verb pairing game"
The verb pairing game can be done after the teacher highlights some collocations to the students. After that, students will be divided into two groups. Group 1 will have some corpus derived sentences without the verbs make and do. Group 2 will have the verbs make or do. Students in both groups will stand in lines facing each other. The ones carrying verbs will take turns trying to pair their verbs with the sentences the 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. The teacher prepares a passage or a number of sentences on Microsoft Word with every do and make being deleted. Students should complete the passages and then print them out for the teacher. Another way is to use peer-evaluation first before answers are discussed in class.
"Screen shot analysis"
After introducing the idea of corpus in class, a data show could be used to illustrate how frequent nouns occur with certain verbs and not others.
♥ Intermediate students: Modal verbs
"Contextual Analysis"
Students got a number of sentences obtained from any of two corpora for analysis. They should analyze the context of each why one modal verb is used rather than the other. For example, students could be given the following sentence and asked why “have to” is used instead of "must":
"Cloze activities"
Students will be given a worksheet with some sentences from a certain corpus. Modal verbs will be deleted. They have to fill in the blanks with the modal verb they think is most appropriate to use. After they finish, they will compare their answers with a partner. The teacher will then display the correct answers to the whole class and they can all discuss why certain modal verbs are used.
Students will be given a worksheet that includes a number of sentences with wrong modal verbs. Students will work in pairs trying to spot the error and decide on the best modal verb to use in each sentence. Results can be either discussed as a whole class activity or in pairs.
"Multiple-choices"
Students will be given sentences obtained from a certain corpus. For each sentence, 3 choices will be provided as explanations of the meaning of the sentence.
"Express yourself"
A number of sentences that express suggestion/obligation will be written on small folded pieces of paper. The teacher will then write a situation on the board. Students will randomly draw pieces of paper and read the sentences on them. Some sentences will be relevant to the situation on the board and some will not. This is a fun activity 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.
♥ Upper intermediate students: Phrasal verbs
"Cloze activity"
Students will be given a worksheet with some sentences from the corpus. Phrasal verbs will be deleted. They have to fill in the blanks with the family-related phrasal verb that is suitable to the text. After they finish, they will compare their answers with a partner. The teacher will then display the correct answers to the whole class and they can all discuss why certain phrasal verbs are used.
♥ Advanced students: Idiomatic Expressions
"Concordance Analysis"
After training students on how to use online corpora, 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.
Following are some idiomatic expressions with the verb break.
1. Break a leg meaning to wish good luck
With luck, I will break a leg or something.
2. Break bread meaning to eat together
Joshua Morris had not invited him to break bread in Clungunford-----
"Pragmatics: Situation analysis"
This activity could be done after students are introduced to the different uses and meanings of apologies. For this activity, students will be divided into groups. Each group will receive corpus-based dialogues on flash cards, and students will decide the meaning and the level of sincerity of the apology. Examples of corpus-based dialogues: Determine the meaning of the apology used in the following dialogues:
1. We apologize for the delay, which has been caused by the traffic jam.
2. I am sorry but you will have to leave.
Conclusion
Although using corpora in language teaching is challenging, it has a big potential in EFL classrooms. If teachers are trained on how to design suitable corpus-based tasks, they can help their students get exposed to a broader framework of how English is used for communication by native speakers. Certain points to bear in mind while designing corpus-based tasks include the ability level of the students, cultural and educational backgrounds and the age group of the students. It is also recommended to use online corpora as they are available for anybody at any given time. In class a specialized corpus is needed, EFL instructors and researchers need to make sure it is available at their institutions. The researchers' next plan is to examine some of the activities listed above using a more in-depth approach to highlight the benefits, challenges and drawbacks of each.
Reference
Neveen Al Saeed & Salma Waly. Corpus for Classrooms: Ideas for Material Design, Proceedings of the 10th METU ELT Convention.
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