Week 7 : Corpus for Classrooms : Ideas for Material Design

Corpus for Classrooms : Ideas for Material Design

In this paper, the researchers will quide the readers on how corpora can help students understand how contain language forms are used by native speakers of English, They will give a briefly review on studies discussing the benefits and the challenges of using corpus in language learning. The researcher will then go through some corpus-based materials and activities suitable for different language levels.

In the first part of the paper is a brief review of literature that mainly aims at showing how other researchers went about using corpora in their language classrooms and how effective that was. The researchers also point out other elements that affect the use of corpus such as the role of the teacher and the challenges that face both students and teachers when using corpora.

As for the second part of the paper, the researchers present a number of ideas for planning corpus-based activities. Those activities are tailored so that they meet the different language abilities of students in L2 classroom. The researchers will demonstrate how vocabulary, grammar, idiomatic expressions and pragmatic constraints could be covered in EFL classroom using corpus-based resources.

Corpus-based Activities and Idea for Material Design

Elementary

- Verb pairing

- Computer cloze activity

- Screen shot analysis

Intermediate students : Modal verbs

- Contextual Analysis

- Cloze activities

- Spot the error activity

- Express yourself

Upper intermediate student : Phrasal Verb

- Cloze activity

Advanced students : Idiomatic Analysis

- Concordance Analysis

- Pragmatics : Situation analysis

          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-base tasks, they can help their students get exposed to a broader framework of how English is used for communication by native speaker. Certain points to bear in mind while designing corpus-base tasks include the ability level of the student, 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 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.

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Week 6 : Modal Auxiliary In British English : A Corpus-Based Study Of Modality Through British Nation Corpus

Modal Auxiliary In British English : A Corpus-Based Study Of Modality Through British Nation Corpus

BNC web is a useful device to explore practical usage in English language. Besides common grammatical knowledge, collates can give new insight and broaden our point of view.

The British National Corpus contains approximately 100 million words and it is constructed by collection of various types of written British English of the late twentieth century for 90 percent and of different types of spoken data for 10 percent. BNC is deemed as representative sample of practical usage in contemporary English language.

The corpus has been finally developed into a web-based program which researchers can retrieve lexical grammatical and textual data for word in which they are interested.

In this paper three modal verbs('must', 'should' and 'have to') will be investigated through the British National Corpus web-based program to illicit their grammatical differences and usage in English.

Modal verbs (must should' and have to') have been explained in theoretical usage in many textbooks and sometimes each one exemplified by unrealistic examples. Through application of BNC web, collocates can elucidate unforeseen patterns that co-occur with each model verb and this will assist, at least English teachers to give realistic examples to their students from the top list of collocates. However, the top list is flexible due to, firstly, a span of words in left and right position and Secondly, statistical methods were to change to other values. Although the differences might be diminutive, othe investigation is still appealing as it may enrich our point of view in modalities.

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Week 5 : Using corpus analysis software to analyse specialised texts

Using corpus analysis software to analyse specialised texts

1. What is a corpus?

In corpus linguistics, a corpus (sometimes used in the plural form 'corpora') can be generally defined as...'a collection of naturally-occurring texts in a computer-readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software

2. Sources of language corpora

• Subscribe to a large corpus provider such as the British National Corpus (BNC) http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

• Use web concordancing

- http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/protected/query.html (general corpus; English)

- http://corpus.byu.edu/ (general corpus; American/British English)

- http://lextutor.ca/conc/eng/ (general and specialized corpora; English)

- http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/TNCII/ (general corpus; Thai)

-http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/ParaConc/index.html (English-Thai parallel concordance)

• Compile own corpora and analyse data using corpus analysis software - Antconc'(http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html) (for monolingual corpus) - Wordsmith' (http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/) (for monolingual corpus) - 'Paraconc' (http://www.athel.com/para.html) (for multilingual corpora)

3. Designing a specialized corpus

Corpus size

• There are no fixed rules; depending on research purposes, availability of data and time.

• Large, general corpora may be less useful than small, focused corpora if searches are made on context-specific terms.

• There are limitations of 'too small' corpora e.g. not enough hits to make decent generalization, not covering enough concepts, terms, or patterns under investigation.

• It is preferable to create a 'monitor' or 'open' corpus because specialized words/usage are dynamic

Text extracts vs. full texts

• Depends on the aim of corpus compilation.

• Whole text offers more coverage because words or terms to be looked at may be randomly

distributed throughout the text.

• Specific sections may be helpful if we are looking for words or phrases under particular

content areas or want to create purposeful sub-corpora.

Number of texts

• Choices can be made between collect few texts of large size or a number of texts with smaller sizes. • Choices can also be made between selecting texts written by one or two key writers or sources, or texts retrieved from different sources or written by different authors.

• Depends on your research focus e.g. to study overall language use or to study linguistic choices preferred by particular writers.

Medium

• Can be spoken or written texts or mixed.

• Depends on research questions.

• Some practical factors should also be considered e.g. compiling spoken corpora can be when consuming and needs special types of tagging (= giving codes to the data c.8. curang, paralinguistic features)

Subject and text type

• Should mainly focus on the specialized text under investigation, although this is less clear-cut

in multidisciplinary subjects.

• Texts may come from different subjects if the research focus is on the study of particular language features rather than term extraction.

• Text types within a specialized subject field may vary from "expert-to-expert' texts to 'expert-to-non-expert' texts, or in other words, from technical to popular texts.

Other considerations

• Authorship: Texts written by experts in a field tend to present more reliable and authentic examples of specialised language.

• Language: Specialised texts can be stored and retrieved in the form of monolingual. comparable, or parallel corpora.

• Publication date: Texts should come from recent publications unless queries are made in relation to particular periods of time.

4. Sources of specialized texts

• Printed materials (must be converted to text files using a scanner with good OCR (Ontin Character Recognition) software.

• Word document texts (must be converted to text files e.g. using 'save as' or cut and texts in Notepad) • CD-ROMs (must be converted to text files)

• Texts on the Web (must be converted to text files and/or have the html mark-ups remove

• Online databases (must convert word documents or pdf documents into text files)

5. Getting started with Antconc

Download the latest version of Antconc and watch YouTube tutorials from http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc index.html)

6. Creating a specialised corpus profile

A sample profile

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Week 4 : Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

1. What are the problems struggling writers have in writing classes?

    Struggling writers are often less motivated to write and fails to organize their ideas. These learners usually have poor handwriting and writes slowly or illegibly. They also have problems in expressing their idea through composition and have trouble communicating and understanding their teacher. Additionally, they are a lack of confidence in producing text and insecure feeling about showing their writing to others, in particular to their peers. These problems will be worse when learners have to write in languages other than their native language such as in EFL classes.

2. What does 'digital writing' refer to?

    Digital writing refer to standard way of life for young learners within Generation M.

3. What are the three digital writing tools? Give brief descriptions?

   3.1 Blogs is a discussion, informational article or personal journal, published on the World Wide Web, which is often frequently update.

   3.2 Instant Messaging (IM) - MSN, Line, Twitter, Skype, chat-room is a form of Internet-based, real time text communication between users on the same system.

   3.3 Social Network Site (SNS) is a website or an online service platform in which interest, create a public or semi-public profile, and interact with other users.

4. How has digital writing enhanced the teaching of writing?

  1. They provide opportunities for users to use nicknames or pseudonyms.

  2. Learners actually type out what they want to communicate to the group or readers.

  3. The anonymity feature of digital writing enhances a peer feedback activity as students feel less threatened and less pressured when giving or receiving feedback.

  4. digital writing promotes learners' equity in terms of interaction.

  5. Increases student-centered learning.

  6. Encourages collaborative learning

 7. digital writing involves different modes of representation combining text, audio, video, still images, animation, and/or interactive features.

5. What are the things that you should take into consideration to employ digital writing for teaching academic writing?

    Many English teachers are still concerned that its specific register such as shorthand and emoticons may yield negative impact to many teen users. In addition, English teachers and scholars are worried that these easy-to use symbolic abbreviations will likely deconstruct verifiable grammatical rules.

6. Which activity do you like most? Why?

I like Role Play because this activity allows students to enjoy both fun and learning at the same time. They have to imagine and create situations as well as play a role in the show and also practice speaking and courage.

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