Another Reflection Another Week

Due to the snow day this week I don't feel like I have too much to reflect on this time around. We looked at different corpora which are always interesting tools, but we didn't talk about the readings much this week. When working with the COCA corpus I always seem to run into some sort of difficulty. Either the website is going too slow or not working at all, or my search brings up too many hits so they can't display my results or I can't figure out what to put into the search engine to find what I want to find. I feel that with more use of the corpus and a more detailed look at my options I could probably figure out what I am doing wrong and finally use the site correctly, but I feel that the individual use of a corpus is not designed for beginning learners, or young learners. I feel that trying to let either of these groups use a corpus to get an activity done by themselves would result in mass confusion and more problems than answers. Because of this  have decided that I will never use a corpus-based activity or task with those two groups of learners.

With that being said, I do believe that a corpus is a useful tool for the older and more advanced students of English. The use of concordance data can really help students learn about practical and accurate uses of the language as well as show them the differences between genres (spoken, written, academic, informal, etc.). This can be especially helpful for students who want to learn English for a specific purpose. If they want to learn English for academic reasons than looking at the data in the corpus for the academic genre can help, while students who want to become a fluent speaker can look at the conversation genre data. Additionally, I believe that a corpus can help build learner strategies in the students which can help them further their academic goals as well as their English proficiency.

I have created an activity below that explains one of the ways in which a corpus can be used with learners. It is similar to the activity we did in class except that it ties the use of the corpus to relevant vocabulary and previous knowledge that the students have gained during the previous classes. This lesson shows that corpora can be used effectively in the classroom, but one must be careful how and with what students the corpus is used.