Teaching with Corpus: Big Data, Small Learners, Huge Impact

 Hi, everyone!

For our second assignment in this class, we were asked to create a corpus-based teaching material and a lesson plan based on the ASSURE model for Turkish EFL learners in high school. You may ask Almina, "What is a corpus?".A corpus (plural form: corpora) is a collection of linguistic data compiled from written or spoken texts stored in a digital format. The most famous ones are COCA (Corpus of Contemporary English) and BNC (British National Corpus). However we used CorpusMate in our material and lesson plan since it was less complicated than COCA. 

Again, you may ask "What is the ASSURE model?". The ASSURE model is a model that is used to implement and engage technology and media effectively and systematically in the teaching process.

So, now you know what it means, you can see our lesson plan and material that we made as a group with my friends Beyza, Sude, and Nilüfer:

-Lesson plan

-Material

Making the material was fun and tiring at the same time, but it was mostly very enjoyable. I think it was a bit tiring because when we were picking which corpus to use, we looked at different ones, and most of them were hard to use and confusing. For example, COCA, I still don't have much clue on how to use it because it is very complicated. But the one we chose was CorpusMATE, and I think it is suitable for the use of high school students as well. Designing the activities and using Canva was my favorite part because we wanted them to have nice visuals. Since we knew the ASSURE model beforehand, making the lesson plan was enjoyable and didn't take too long as well.

 In our material, we required the use of corpus for both teachers and students. I like the idea of teachers using the Corpus to design activities, but I'm not sure how much students are going to enjoy using it in the classroom since it can get challenging. However, I am certain that students should know and be aware of the existence of corpus because it will be useful for them.

                                         Thank you for being here and take care!