Sofia FunengaLisbon, 26th November

Exploring Corpora

with Young Learners

Class: - 4th year - 9 / 10 years old

(English language learners from the age of 3)

- A2 / B1 level

Topic: - Dinosaurs

Language focus: - Vocabulary and chunks related to dinosaurs

Context

In Class

DINOSAURS

- In pairs, try to find 10 words related to dinosaurs

- Words can be or

- Write the words next to the puzzle

How much do you know about…

DINOSAURS?

How many words were you able to find?

Let’s do some dino-reading!

1. In pairs, read the text and then decide whether each sentence is true or false.

2. You have 5 minutes to complete this task.

Time is counting…

Do you know any films about dinosaurs?

For the next task1. Listen to a news report about Jurassic Park and fill in the gaps.

2. You can only write one word in each gap.

Do you need any help?

Almost finishingNow, to complete each sentence, choose the correct option.

Very good, everyone!Off you go, now!You did really good today!

At home, you can go to

the Natural History Museum site

and find out much more about dinosaurs.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/kids-only/dinosaurs/

Rationale

- Very appealing topic for children

Motivation enhances learning

- Provides opportunity to teach vocabulary and grammar at the same time

- young learners teaching should focus on vocabulary and chunks, rather than explicit grammar (McKay 2006)

Why Dinosaurs?

- “The instant availability of searchable online corpora has much to offer to the teacher of English in both first and second language contexts.” (Anderson 2009)

- Real and authentic language

- Young Learners – “The searching task from a corpus may be too overwhelming for beginners or young learners” (Chen 2004)

Corpus based exercises and materials

Why using corpora?

Different corpus and the words dinosaur / dinosaurs

- BNC – British National Corpus- COCA – Corpus of Contemporary American English

- Time Magazine Corpus- Business Letter Corpus - Compara

- Micase - Sacodeyl

- Europarl- Open Subtitles

Written and spoken language

Written language

Spoken language

Transcriptions

BNC COCABusiness

Letter Corpus

Time Magazine Micase Sacodeyl Compara Europarl Open

Subtitles

dinosaur 294 2241 - 401 - - - 7 59

dinosaurs 458 2301 - 446 5 - 2 25 52

highest number of hits for both words : Corpus of Contemporary American English

Preparation for the warm-up

1. Use of COCA to find out which words are more commonly related to dinosaur

2. Selection of the words

3. Design the word search puzzle using the

1 – BONES (97 hits)2 - MONUMENT (55 hits)3 – FOSSILS (52 hits)4 - EGGS (41 hits)10 - MUSEUM (23 hits)19 – SKELETON (18 hits)20 – PALEONTOLOGISTS (15 hits) 21 – JURASSIC (15 hits)22 – DIG (15 hits)32 – FOOTPRINTS (12 hits)

True / False exercise

1. Selection of the text: finding a real text

True / False exercise

2. Check the level of the text – Oxford 3000

True / False exercise

- “in a typical lower intermediate text close to 100% of the words will be Oxford 3000 keywords” ( http://www.oup.com/oald-bin/oxfordProfiler.pl)

- 96 % of the words of this text are part of the Oxford 3000

suitable text for A2 learners

3. Design the true / false exercise

True / False exercise

- use of

- on-line exercise: enhancing motivation

- time limit: more challenging

Gap filling exercise

1. Selection of the text

Gap filling exercise

- BNC – British National Corpus- Oxford 3000 to check the level of the text

2. Preparation of the text

- text read by another teacher / student - text recorded using

“Teachers can design a gap filling task for students to do in pairs. (...) Teachers can use the authentic contexts searched from corpora to compose a gap-filling sheet for students to work on.” (Chen 2004)

3. Design exercise

Gap filling exercise

- use of

- short-answer exercise – allows students to practice listenning and writing

- on-line exercise: motivating

- clues and hints: opportunity for weaker students to succeed

1. Selection of the sentences

Multiple choice exercise

- corpus based exercise

- real sentences from very different contexts

- focus on vocabulary and grammar structures at the same time

- opportunity to analyse unfamiliar / curious structures or words

• based on the most frequent collocates for the word dinosaur

• 93% of the words are part of the Oxford 3000

sentences taken from:• COCA• BNC• Time Magazine• Open Subtitles

2. Design the exercise

Multiple choice exercise

- use of

- multiple choice exercise

- focus on the meaning of words related to dinosaurs

Suggestion of visiting the website of the Natural History Museum of London

Homework

- content aimed at the students’ age

- simple but real language aiming at native speakers

- informal and motivational task for students to play outside the classroom with the class language and content

- opportunity to relate the class topic to the cultural aspect of the Museum

This lesson will only be possible if:

- Each student (or pair of students) has access to a computer

- Internet is available

Implications

Summing up...

- ICT helps creating appealing activities for students - “ICT is motivating both for students and for teachers. It makes the learning

process more enjoyable” (Davies 2010)

- Corpus-based materials provide several opportunities for

contact with real / authentic language

- All taks can be put online (blog, moodle, Twiducate, e-mail)

- Teacher can use this presentation with more than one class

References- Anderson, W & Corbett, J (2009) Exploring English with Online Corpora, London: Palgrave MacMillan Davies. - British National Corpus <http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/x.asp> (accessed 19 November 2010).- Business Letter Corpus <http://www.someya-net.com/concordancer/index.html> (accessed 19 November

2010).- Chen, (2004) “The Use of Corpora in the Vocabulary Classroom”, The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. 10, 9.- Compara < http://www.linguateca.pt/COMPARA/index.php> (accessed 19 November 2010).- Corpus of Contemporary American English <http://www.americancorpus.org/> (accessed 19 November 2010).- Davies G. & Hewer S. (2010) Introduction to new technologies and how they can contribute to language

learning and teaching. Module 1.1 in Davies G. (ed.) Information and Communications Technology for Language Teachers (ICT4LT), Slough, Thames Valley University.

- Europarl En < http://urd.let.rug.nl/tiedeman/OPUS/bin/opuscqp.pl?corpus=Europarl3;lang=en> (accessed 19 November 2010).

- First News <www.firstnews.co.uk> (accessed 19 November 2010).- McCarthy, M. (2004) From Corpus to Course Book, Cambridge University Press.- McKay, P. (2006) Assessing Young Learners, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.- Micase < http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/> (accessed 19 November 2010).- Natural History Museum < http://www.nhm.ac.uk/kids-only/dinosaurs > (accessed 20 November 2010).- OpenSubtitles < http://urd.let.rug.nl/tiedeman/OPUS/bin/opuscqp.pl?corpus=OpenSubtitles;lang=eng>

(accessed 19 November2010).- Oxford 3000 http://www.oup.com/oald-bin/oxfordProfiler.pl (accessed 21 November 2010)- Sacodeyl < http://sacodeyl.inf.um.es/sacodeyl-search2/> (accessed 19 November 2010).- Time Corpus < http://corpus.byu.edu/time/x.asp> (accessed 19 November2010).