Comeback Post + Corpus-Based Teaching Material

Welcome back!!! Well, I guess it wasn't a goodbye? Today I will discuss my experience in designing corpus-based material. Hope you enjoy :)

A corpus is any collection of more than one text. For our new semester and class, we had an assignment on designing corpus-based material. I worked on it with my dear friend Sümeyye. It was my first time using a corpus thanks to this class and I found it very effective for language learning. Students will be able to become active and autonomous thanks to the incorporation of corpora and they will benefit from being a language researcher.

Our target group was EFL learners enrolled in a high school in Turkey. Also, our grammar focus was different uses of "a few" and "a little". After deciding on our focus for the assignment we designed the material on Canva. I found Canva very efficient and fast for designing materials. It allows you to edit freely without any limitations. We created a visually engaging worksheet for the students by using color and pictures to attract the students' attention. For the corpus we chose Skell. The reason for this is that it is fast and easy to use. Even though most of our students are going to be digital natives, I think using a simple corpus can both benefit the students and the teachers. One of the problems that might occur if our material is implemented in a real classroom is that there might be a digital divide. Some students might not have access to technology or be digital immigrants. We can solve this through school computers or by students borrowing their parents' digital devices. Moreover, for students who are not familiar with technology, the teacher has to guide them to discover and learn about it by showing it in practice.

Here is our corpus-based teaching material: 

(click here in case you can not see the embedded material.)