Designing a Corpus-Based Teaching Material

Hello, my dear readers! 💕

Long time no see! I missed y'all! Did you miss me too? 😿

I am back here again to share my experience in creating a corpus-based teaching material. We were to design a worksheet for high school students with my group friends, Bilge Dilara Doğan and Yağmur Kavak. You can reach their blogs by clicking on their names! We chose the topic "too and enough" for the worksheet. Our aim was to teach the differences and usages of the words inductively. Also, we wanted students to get help from the corpus while they were working on the worksheet. Therefore, we set to work with an activity in which students can check their knowledge. After they test themselves, they will complete the other task by discovering the patterns themselves with the help of the corpus. For the final tasks, they will have learned the usages and differences between the words "too" and "enough" with the former activities and the help of corpus, so they will be able to complete the tasks easily. We used Canva to design our worksheet and it was very helpful. After we designed it, we also prepared a lesson plan based on the ASSURE model which clarified the characteristics of the worksheet. 

While designing the worksheet we had some difficulties using and explaining the corpus. We used COCA to reach corpus information. COCA has a confusing interface for me. To use it efficiently, you need to know some symbols and meanings of them. Also, it was hard to insert the corpus explanations in the material. I think students might get confused because of the same reasons while working on corpus. Everything aside, it was fun to design a worksheet, especially choosing colors and trying to make it appealing to students!

👈This might be how working with corpus looks like 👀  

Click here to see the worksheet that we created. 

Click here to see our lesson plan. 

I am curious about your thoughts on our material, feel free to leave a comment!

Toodles!! 👋

nis