Hello, everyone! Long time, no see! I am glad that I can go on keeping in touch with my followers. I hope that you have been doing alright.
Today, I came up with a completely different and an authentic task that me and my peer Ali Efe Aslan have designed in the Current Issues in ELT classes. It is corpus-based teaching material. To begin with, corpus is a large set of oral and written texts used for linguistic analysis and corpora is the plural form of corpus. There are several corpus genres, including written, spoken, multimodal, bilingual, etc. In this sense, corpus can be utilized for teaching grammar and vocabulary. At this point, my peer and I aimed at designing corpus-based teaching material as a task for teaching the morphological and semantic differences between "will" and "be going to".
In the task, CorpusMate was highly beneficial for students to search "will" and "be going to" and discover their grammatical and semantic functions. The target audience for this task is high school preparatory classes in the state schools. Since they get intensive education for English, it is estimated that this task will be effective in their using it for learning "will" and "be going to". Firstly, students are asked to test their initial knowledge of them before using corpus to discover their functions and usages. Throughout the process, there are some instructions given in the task for students to use corpus and they are firstly expected to write three example sentences for "will" and "be going to" based on their findings on corpus after comprehensive research for the functions and meanings of them.
When it comes to the objectives of the task, there are some objectives as follows:
Students will be able to learn the grammar and lexis items inductively and they will fulfill discovery learning.
They will be able to actively construct their knowledge of "will" and "be going to" through discovering language patterns.
Students will be able to think critically towards the functions and meanings of "will" and "be going to".
Students will be able to engage in authentic and real-world tasks and solve the problems that may arise regarding the grammar topic both inside the classroom environment and outside the classroom environment. They will also be able to work collaboratively with their classmates.
Regarding English teachers, they will be able to facilitators and guides during the task.
Students will be able to discover and notice the patterns of "will" and "be going to" according to the principles of Data Driven Learning (DDL).
Students will be able to be in the exploratory learning environment and they will be able to be motivated.
As regards to the process of material design, it was difficult for me to design activities and instructions while considering such pedagogic factors as the target audience, their anticipated English proficiency, their sociocultural backgrounds, their preferred learning styles, aptitudes, etc. Moreover, the instructions for the material design task given by the instructor was a little bit confusing for me in terms of the process of design and I appealed for help from the instructor on Google Classroom for corpus preference. Other than that, I designed all the pre- and post- activities and exercises; therefore, it was rather convenient for me to design them. I designed circle-the-correct-one for pre- and fill-in-the-blanks, correct-the-sentences, and complete-the-scenarios for post-tasks; on the other hand, my peer prepared the corpus research and discovery learning tasks. I chose sentences from various worksheets I have been recently using such as British Council Teens. However, I completely designed every detail in the last task. After the feedback given by the instructor as suggestions, I revised the mistakes such as page layouts, fonts, numbering points, etc.
Lastly, there may be some implications and subsequently limitations for the task to be implemented in a real classroom. Those are as follows:
Teachers and students may lack the knowledge of the use of corpus even if the corpus interface seem to be simple for using.
There may be the lack of time due to the loaded syllabus to cover and less class hours.
The contents of the available corpus may not yield the results according to the students' needs.
There may be the lack of technological infrastructure both in the classroom and at students' houses.
The instructions and tasks may be difficult for some students and there may be a need for reorganizing the tasks for differentiated learning environment.
In conclusion, it was such a demanding but effective task and there are multifaceted implications of the task in educational settings.
That is all for today, guys. I hope that you can benefit from this blog while designing similar materials for implementing in your classrooms as pre-service and in-service teachers. There are the pictures of the task layouts and the blog link of my peer below the page. Take care!
Tuğrul.
Here is the link of my peer's blog: https://gaintheguitaristblogger.wordpress.com/2023/12/02/447/