Corpus for Classrooms: Ideas for Material Design 

        💭 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. Nevertheless, in the last 30 years, the use of corpora in classrooms has started to develop (Varley, 2008).

        📝 Literature review

📢 Varley (2008), investigated how corpora improve students’ vocabulary and grammar. She explored whether teachers prefer to use corpora or traditional tools like dictionaries and grammar books.

    During the 14 weeks of the study, participants attended 4 hours of instruction each week.

     Two hours were dedicated to introducing students to the theoretical background of corpora, research done on the use of corpora in classrooms, and other readings that raised the awareness of the students to the use of  corpora.

    As 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.

    At the beginning, they were given guided activities to search for a certain problematic language area. Towards the end of the study, however, participants were asked to submit a project where they were given the freedom to choose any language feature, search for it in the corpus and write a paper about the findings.  

     Findings revealed that most of the participants agreed that corpora are very beneficial for their language learning and they would depend on them for future reference. Varley found out that corpora helped students to learn about certain language uses that were not available in any of the traditional tools. In addition, corpora allowed students to examine these language features in context.

    Corpora have their disadvantages as well as their benefits.

   👎 Some corpus software is not available for students. That is why the researcher recommended that teachers introduce their students to free corpora online.

   👎 Another obstacle facing students is that when  searching any corpus, students are confused because of the large amounts of search results.

    📢 Neff et al. (2001) and Simpson & Mendis (2003) do not focus on using corpora for planning activities and tasks in their studies. They, instead, highlight the usefulnessof using corpus analysis to get ideas about the problems that non-native speakers of English  encounter while writing or studying in English.

    📢 Neff et al. (2001) investigated the differences in the use of modal verbs between Spanish learners of English and native speakers of English. 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.  Such problems are challenging since teachers should find ways to overcome language transfer errors.

    📢Simpson and Mendis (2003), investigated the usefulness of corpora in acquiring idioms. They wanted to explore whether idioms appeared in corpora or not. They found that idioms are found in corpora and that corpora could be used to design teaching materials. Moreover, corpora provide students with authentic contexts, which means that students learn language in context and not  in isolation. 

      💬Saummary, it becomes clear that 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.

        📝 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 

    To integrate the use of technology in our classes, computer cloze activities might be used to help students practice the uses of both verbs and to learn their collocations. The teacher might prepare 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. 

💥 Intermediate students: Modal verbs 

         👉 Contextual Analysis 

    Students will be given a number of sentences obtained from any of the two corpora used in this analysis. They should try to analyze the context of each to see 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.

         👉 Spot the error activity 

    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. 

        You should plan to go to Houston. It would be a lot of fun. 

    a. The speaker and the listener are probably friends.√ 

    b. The speaker is the listener’s boss. X 

    c. The speaker and the listener barely know each other. X 

         👉 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 activity that exposes students to a large number of sentences using modal relevant to the situation on the board and some will not. This is a fun verbs.  Students can negotiate the meaning of the sentences and decide which can be used and which cannot. 

    Situation on the board: 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)√ 

    

💥 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. They can all discuss why certain phrasal verbs are used. The teacher will then display the correct answers to the whole class.

💥 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.

Reference:

Al Saeed, N., & Waly, S. (2009). Corpus for Classrooms: Ideas for Material Design. Proceedings of the 10th METU ELT Convention.