I made a corpus-based material AGAIN - it wasn't any easier.

Well, things didn't turn out exactly how I planned.

Welcome back to my blog! I kind of alluded to this with the "final post", how I would be doing more posts here. I didn't think it'd be the same class, but hey, let's hope it works out this time.

Same as last year, our first assignment this year was creating a corpus-based teaching material. Since my usual assignment buddies aren't retaking the class, I had to make some new friends for this assignment. This time, I worked in a group of 3 with Lara and Merve, who were kind enough to offer me a spot.

 

Our choice of corpus database was CorpusMate, designed by the creator of SkELL which I used last year. It functions near-identically to SkELL, only it is tweaked and streamlined a bit to suit young learners better. In addition to providing it as a resource in the activity, it was quite useful for us in coming up with example activities.

If you would like to see the work before I go into more detail, you can check it out here.

 

The objective of the activity is to teach students the different use cases of "could" and "would", how they fit into different sentence structures, and differences between the two. It being only two similarly-written words with somewhat close meanings made it seem like a simple topic at first, perhaps even too much so. But once you look into it more deeply you see that there are numerous meanings each of the words can have in a sentence. Whereas my work last year focused more on the tasks in the material, I think the biggest benefit a student can gain from this activity is examining the corpus and intuitively learning just how many different ways these words can be used.

In addition to the activity, differently from last year if I remember correctly, we also created a lesson plan to go along with it. It is a form of lesson plan based on the ASSURE model, which utilizes our modern understanding of education with greater focus on student participation and the facilities today's technology provides. It is really intuitive, you can get a solid understanding just by examining some examples of it. Even the name is an acronym! Well, sort of. Once you've checked out our material, you can take a look at the lesson plan here.

Thanks for reading my post... about a corpus-based material... again. Let's hope this year turns out for the better! See you on the next post!