Hello to all of you! I hope everything is good with you! I haven't posted anything on my blog in a while, and I really missed this. We took a class this year called "Current Issues in ELT," and one of the assignments we had to finish was "creating a corpus-based teaching material”. I completed this task with my friend Sude Özer.
Before beginning, I want to explain some terms related to the task. The first one is data-driven learning. This approach assumes that language is data and the students are the ones who act as a researcher to discover and understand it. For our handout, we chose Skell corpus. We chose a grammar subject which is the difference between ‘have to', and 'must'. Before I go into more detail, you can look at the worksheet at the bottom of the page.
The handout (which I provided below) consists of four parts. In the first part, we test our students' current knowledge by giving them a fill in blanks activity. Students will be able to understand their deficiencies after completing this task, which will motivate them to concentrate on it when doing the subsequent exercises.
In the second part, we wanted our students to go to the corpora website called Skell and instructed them to write ‘must’ and then ‘have to’ respectively in the search bar. Students will look at the examples and analyze them. The second exercise encourages students to use a corpus website, where they can view realistic examples of the targeted real-life usage. Afterwards, we asked our students to write down the sentences they found and liked.
In the third part, we gave a table again and asked our students to write the differences between ‘have to’ and ‘must’. We also asked them to do this part with their peers and discuss it. In the fourth part, we gave the students the fill in blank activity again and asked them to practice. In the second activity, they had to use their own words to make sentences with the words they learned. Thus, we made sure that our students learned the subject thoroughly.
In my opinion, students will love this activity because they will learn by researching on their own. However, one of the problems that teachers may encounter while doing this activity may be technological inadequacy. Because not every student may have a digital device. Also, if the school does not have the necessary equipment, this activity may be impossible.
Here is the link of our project
It was all for today's post. Thank you for reading.
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