Materials Development #1

Level/Course Name: High-Intermediate ELL’s in a University English Program (15 students from various L1 backgrounds)

Lesson Written by: Haley Winters

Lesson Objectives: 

• Students will become familiar with a new reading strategy
• Students will be able to reinforce word meanings they already know
• Identify unfamiliar vocabulary in a text
• infer meaning of unfamiliar words with the use of the COCA corpus

This lesson includes (check those that apply):

• Individual work
• Whole class discussion
• Comprehensible input
• Links to past learning
• Guided and independent practice
• Reading, writing and speaking skills

Pre-lesson Inventory:

• Things to bring to class: Handouts for reading activity and instructions for COCA post-reading assignment
• Equipment: Need to request to be in the computer lab
• HW to assign: FInish post-listening activity if couldn’t finish during class

3 mins: 

• Take roll
• Review class agenda  

Warm-up Activity (10 min.):  

Teacher brings in two words unknown to the students and plugs them into the COCA corpus to show how to use the corpus and find the concordances with these words. The teacher asks the students to try and guess the meanings of these two words based on the concordances they see in the corpus. Afterwards the teacher gives them a full definition of the words and they briefly talk about how close (or far away) their guesses were and some strategies for using the corpus later.

Transition: the teacher tells the students they will be using the corpus later to learn more vocabulary related to Soul Surfer and could they please take out their copies of the book.

Pre-reading Activity ( 10 min.):

The students have just finished reading the book Soul Surfer and for the pre-reading the teacher asks the students to discuss what happens in the last chapters  (since they last talked about the book) and how they would feel if they had been bitten by a shark. Would they go back into the ocean? why or why not? This gets the students thinking about the book and how they feel about what happened to the girl in the book.

Transition: the teacher explains that now the students are going to read about Bethany Hamilton’s feelings about what happened to her from an interview she gave with a person form the New York Times. 

Reading Activity ( 15-20 min.):

The teacher hands out the first handout which is an article from the New York Times in which the girl from Soul Surfer is being interviewed and they are talking about the movie that is going to be coming out based on her book/life. The students are asked to read the article and underline at least 5 unknown/unfamiliar words, or words they are familiar with but can’t quite remember their meaning. They are going to be using these words in the post-reading activity.

Transition: The teacher makes sure the students have finished reading the article and asks them to now open the corpus on their computers and he/she hands out the instructions for the next activity. 

Post-Reading Activity ( 20-25 min./rest of class):

For the first 15-20 min. the students will take the five (or more) words that they underlined and plug them into the COCA corpus. They will investigate the concordance data for each of these words and try to infer their meaning from the data. With this information they must type up their words, the inferred definition of the words and five sentences from the concordance data for each word to support their definition. If students don’t have enough time to type and print up their assignment they can finish it for homework. For the last 5-10 min. the teacher asks the students which words they found difficult, the teacher will write down the most commonly reoccurring difficult words on the board and then the teacher will explain more clearly what these words mean to the whole class.

Homework (5 mins): 

If the students were unable to finish the post-reading activity than they need to complete it for homework and bring it to the next class to turn in.  

Back-up activity (variable-time activity): 

 If the corpus is down/not working than the teacher will instead start playing the Soul Surfer  DVD that he/she has brought to class as a backup activity and the students will work with the corpus on another day.

Assessment: 

Students must type their list of difficult vocabulary words, write an inferred meaning for each, and include 5 sentences from the concordance that support their inferred meaning.This will help the teacher figure out if the students followed the directions, explored the vocabulary words and used critical thinking to connect the concordance results to a working definition.

Tools: 

The article found at the below link (a printed copy for each student):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/sports/03seconds.html

Also instructions for the post-reading activity:

Soul Surfer Concordancing Assignment

1. Choose at least five unfamiliar words, or words you are familiar with but can not remember the meaning from the New York Times article. 

2. You will be using these words and plugging them into the COCA corpus. 

3. You will examine the concordance data for each word and deduct the meaning from context. 

Final assignment to turn in: 

1. Type your personal list of difficult vocabulary words.

2.  Write an inferred meaning for each word, and include 5 sentences from the concordance to support your definition.

3. Print out this assignment and turn it in at the end of class. 

(If you do not complete it in-class, this will be homework)

The last thing needed is access to the COCA corpus at:
www.americancorpus.org/

Overview:

         This lesson is designed for a class of upper-intermediate to advanced learners English. This class in mind contains between 14 and 20 students who are all international students at a University in their English language program. The class overall is an integrative skills class that focuses on all four major skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) over the course of the semester with this specific lesson focusing on reading and writing skills, but integrating some speaking skills in too. The students come from a wide range of L1’s so the use of the students native languages by the teacher rarely, if ever, occurs. English is the language spoken for all aspects of the class from instructions to class discussions.

The purpose of this lesson is to help the students develop specific reading strategies as well as build relevant vocabulary and past lesson knowledge. The students h

ave just previously read the biographical story Soul Surfer and this lesson brings in the knowledge the students gleaned from this book in order to continue building vocabulary and reading skills. From this starting point the students will critically think and discuss topics from the book in the pre-reading activity and then read an interview that is between a New York Times writer and Bethany Hamilton (the girl the book is about). From this article the students will find new vocabulary to learn and use the COCA corpus to infer the meaning of these new words. 

The use of the corpus allows students to build their knowledge on how English words are used in context, as well as, teach them a good reading strategy of figuring out what an unfamiliar word means from only it’s context. This helps students learn how to rely on just the text they are reading and not always need to check a dictionary which can interrupt the flow of the reading and discourage students. This is also a valuable strategy when no dictionary is available or when students are practicing extensive reading because it can take too long to look up every unknown word and many times the context provides good clues as to the meaning of the unfamiliar word.