We designed a corpus-based material and found out that it's way harder then we thought.

 Hello! 

Welcome to my first educational post on this blog! This was the first assignment for our Current Issues in Teaching course, creating a corpus-based material for high-school level. Working with me on this was my friend, and flatmate, Salih. Make sure to check his post and rest of his blog here!

The material we made had to be built around the core of text corpus or "real world" text. For a corpus database and research tool, we decided to go with SKEll by Sketch Engine. We used it for our own purposes in addition to providing it as a resource in our material, for the students.

If you want to take a look before I dive into more detail about or work, you can see it here.

 The objective of the material is to make the students be able to differentiate the use cases of "who", "whom" and "whose", specifically as relative pronouns in a relative clause. We decided to go with this for several reasons, first being that they are easy to confuse, "who" and "whom" especially, with how close both their spelling and meanings are. These words also serve a lot of purpose outside of relative clauses, mostly as question words, so we thought it was important to really make sure the students can separate in their minds that all these words can be used in completely different contexts.

The hardest part of the process was actually coming up with the topic. There are so many great things we thought we could teach with a corpus-based material that it made it really difficult to decide on one. After we finally decided our topic though, the rest kind of flew by. 

The whole project really helped us understand and appreciate the finer details that go into designing materials like this. I also think that working on this as we did, analyzing our own work down to the smallest cracks, gave us a new perspective to be able to review class materials much better. Which is of course a fantastic ability for any teacher candidates. 

I hope you also like our work too, I genuinely feel proud of what we managed to make here. Again, you can check the material here.

Thank you for reading what is hopefully first of many more posts to come! See you again!