Hello everyone! I hope you are all doing well. In this post, I'll be talking about my experiences in creating corpus-based teaching material. While doing this task, I worked with my friend, Merve Nur Balcıoğlu. We created a material focusing on the differences between "a few" and "a little", which is a very confusing subject for many learners. As a design tool, we used Canva because it was the most appropriate tool for our purpose. The design process of the material was a little bit challenging, to be honest, as we had many aspects to consider such as the proficiency level of the students, their age, and interest. We tried to come up with activities that were both educational and fun. As the corpus-based web tool, we employed "Skell Sketch Engine" due to its simple interface. We thought it would be easy and understandable for students to use it.
The target audience was high school EFL students in Turkey. With this material, students will be able to learn how to use corpus data based on their needs. They will be able to benefit from authentic linguistic data and discover the differences between " a few" and "a little" themselves which will allow them to take an active part in the process of their learning. Also, the task will enable students to engage in high-order cognitive processing and improve their critical thinking, analyzing, and hypothesizing skills. They will be able to become autonomous learners and learn how to integrate corpus data into their learning.
Although the implementation of corpus data in language classrooms has many benefits, there might be some problems that both the teacher and students may encounter. For instance, if the number of students is high in a classroom, the teacher may not have enough time to invest in training all the students. Without the proper training, the students may not be able to make use of the data and it may cause problems with classroom management. Moreover, as today's teachers haven't learned English with the help of technology, the teacher may lack expertise in using corpus-based data for teaching or may fail to effectively make use of the corpus data for his/her purpose. Another problem might stem from the excessive content of the corpus data. As it provides a considerable amount of content, it may not fit right to the student's needs and it may confuse the learners more.
In a nutshell, I enjoyed designing the material and learned a lot about corpus data in the meantime. As a teacher candidate, I would implement it into my teaching and benefit from its advantages. Hope you enjoyed reading about my experiences with the task, if you'd like to have a look at the material, you can find it embedded below. Hope you like it!
If you cannot view the embedded material below, please click here!
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