1 Introduction and rationale

The weather plays a central role in everyone’s daily life and is therefore also an essential part of everyday English: it is a common topic for small talk, when talking about our holidays, and is also a crucial factor in our choice of clothing. Thus, weather is a topic everyone can refer to and that everyone can say something about. This is also why it is one of the first topics to be taught in English as a Foreign Language (ELF) classes at primary school. In this way, the topic “Weather” contributes to achieving the main objective of all EFL teaching: “to equip learners with competences that allow them to communicate with other speakers of the English language in a respectful manner” (Surkamp & Viebrock 2018: 21) and is thus also in line with the primary school curriculum of Lower Saxony, Germany (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2016: 7).

However, the majority of EFL tasks about the weather in primary school textbooks often only require pupils to repeat, assign or classify pictures and/or single words, which does not help them develop communicative and intercultural competences. According to Thaler (2012: 84), one of the main disadvantages of tasks in EFL textbooks is that they can be repetitive and do not really activate pupils. In line with the core objectives of teaching English as a foreign language, the EFL materials and tasks created in this chapter therefore aim for a more effective and interactive way of learning English at primary school. This chapter provides teachers with a step-by-step guide on how to effectively make use of an appropriate corpus to compile idiomatic spoken language materials that enable primary school pupils to engage in (brief) authentic conversations about the weather in- and outside the classroom.

 

Outline and objectives

Target learners: Primary school pupils at the end of year 3 or (the beginning of) year 4

Teacher preparation time: 90 to 120 min (for three tasks)

Lesson time: 3x 45 min.

Learning objectives:

By the end of the lesson, pupils should be able to…

• answer questions about today’s weather,
• ask others about today’s weather,
• understand and use a range of adjectives typically used to describe the current weather situation in natural conversations,
• understand a simplified weather report.

2 Corpus, tools and methods

As even third grade primary school pupils are still in the process of acquiring and learning grammatical and orthographical features of the literacy system of their native language, the focus when teaching English as a foreign language in primary school should clearly be on oral skills (speaking and listening) (cf. Suhrkamp & Viebrock 2018: 26). The unit described in this chapter therefore mainly aims to improve pupils’ speaking and listening skills. Accordingly, it is advisable to create teaching materials based on language data derived from a corpus of spoken English. The Corpus of American Soap Operas is particularly suitable for this purpose. Several scholars have highlighted the potential of soap operas for the acquisition of a foreign language as they introduce learners to very natural and authentic spoken-like language (Jones & Horak 2014: 12-13; Quaglio 2009: 148-149). The Corpus of American Soap Operas contains 100 million words from more than 22,000 transcripts of ten American soap operas aired between 2001 and 2012. Moreover, this corpus does not include any swear words and is therefore particularly suitable as a basis for the generation of teaching materials for younger learners. The corpus can be accessed freely on www.english-corpora.org. Although it is necessary to register to use this online platform, the creation of a free account (which limits the number of searches per day) is more than sufficient for our purposes and does not restrict the website’s functions in any other way.

The data used for designing teaching materials can be derived with the help of the website’s “Collocates”-function. Collocations are words that “occur most frequently and with statistical significance (i.e. not just by random occurrence) in the word’s environment” (O’Keeffe, McCarthy & Carter 2007: 14). Both actively teaching collocations and making pupils aware of them is key to successful EFL learning, as learning collocations “contributes to the learner’s ability to create associations between words and to place them meaningfully within various networks in relation to other words” (O’Keeffe, McCarthy & Carter 2007: 54). Therefore, it is argued that “learning the collocations of that language is not a luxury if anything above a survival level mastery of the language is desired, since collocation permeates even the most basis, frequent words” (O’Keeffe, McCarthy & Carter 2007: 60). Consequently, it can be seen as a crucial factor for the acquisition of authentic language skills that primary school pupils are given the opportunity to work with EFL materials which include collocations and that they are made aware of these collocations by both the materials and the teacher.

3 Step-by-step guide

3.1 Teacher preparation

3.1.1 Data collection – Conducting corpus queries

Step 1: Registration on www.english-corpora.org

First, go to www.english-corpora.org. Create a free account. Click on “My account” and then on “Register”.

Fig. 1: Registration on www.english-corpora.org

You will then have to fill in a registration form. After submitting this form, you will receive an e-mail which includes a confirmation link.

Fig. 2: Registration form on www.english-corpora.org

Step 2: Selecting a corpus

Next, on the home page, select a corpus from which you would like to draw data. For the unit described in this chapter, the Corpus of American Soap Operas is particularly suitable (see section 2).

Fig. 3: Selecting a corpus

Step 3: Searching for question words – How to ask somebody about the weather

Now you can start searching for language data that can be used for designing your teaching materials. As the topic of the unit is “Weather”, it is advisable to firstly identify how to ask somebody about the weather. In order to do so, you need to use the “Collocates”-function. With the help of this function, you can determine question word(s) which occur together with the word weather. For this, you need to type weather in the upper box and click on “POS” (= part of speech), which appears in light grey letters next to this box. With regard to the lower box, you only need to click on “POS”, which again appears in light grey letters next to the lower box, and select “adv.WH” (Fig. 4). This way, you will obtain a list including all the adverbs that occur together with the noun weather and simultaneously function as question words.

Fig. 4: How to fill in your search box

Last, you need to select the position in which the question word occurs within the sentence. As question words usually occur at the beginning of a question and thus in front of the word weather, you need to select a number on the left side. Since one can assume that there are about two to three words between the question word and the word weather, it is advisable to click on number four. In the end, your search box should look like the one shown in Fig. 5:

Fig. 5: What your search box should look like at the end

If you click on “Find collocates”, a list with question words should appear on your screen (Fig. 6). The most frequent question word used before the word weather is how.

Fig. 6: List of question words that function as an adverb and occur in combination with the noun weather

If you click on the word how, a list appears, showing concrete example sentences in which this particular question word occurs in combination with the noun weather (Fig. 7):

Fig. 7: List of examples in which how occurs in combination with the noun weather

If you compare the single sentences with each other, you will find a common sentence structure: How’s (or is/was) the weather (in …)?

Step 4: Searching for particular parts of speech – Finding adjectives that describe the weather

As a next step, you need to find adjectives that can be used in order to describe a specific weather situation. For this, you again need to use the “Collocates”-function (see step 3). In the lower box, click on “POS” again and this time select “adj.all” (meaning all kinds of adjectives). As the adjectives you are searching for can either occur directly in front of the noun weather (as in xxx weather) or up to three positions after it (as in the weather is very xxx), you need to click on number 1 on the left side and on number 3 on the right side. Your search box should then look like the one shown in Fig. 8:

Fig. 8: Collocate search box before clicking on “Find collocates”

However, you will probably get several different inflected versions of the same adjective (e.g. warm and warmer, cold and colder) if you leave your search box like this. If you want to know how frequent an adjective is regardless of its particular grammatical forms, you need to click on “Options”, which can be found in light grey letters in the right-hand corner, and select “Group by lemmas” (Fig. 9). A lemma is “a form of a word that appears as an entry in a dictionary and is used to represent all the other possible forms” (Cambridge Online Dictionary 2020).

Fig. 9: How to group words by lemmas

If you now click on “Find collocates”, a list similar to the one shown in Fig. 10 should appear on your screen.

Fig. 10: List of adjectives (grouped by lemmas) that frequently occur in combination with the noun weather

The list shown in Fig. 10 includes all adjectives that occur in combination with the noun weather, either directly in front of the word or up to two positions afterwards. To find out more about the specific context in which a certain adjective can be used in combination with weather, click on that particular adjective. Then, a new list will appear on your screen, showing all the example sentences in which this particular combination of the selected adjective and the noun weather occurs. If you click on the date on the far left, you can see more context and obtain information about the American soap opera from which a particular sentence was taken.

Fig. 11: List of example sentences featuring the adjective bad in combination with the noun weather

Based on your findings, you can now choose some adjectives that you would like to introduce to your pupils in the upcoming lessons. When selecting these adjectives, keep in mind that they are sorted by frequency. Given that one of the core objectives of teaching English as a foreign language is the teaching of authentic English, it is advisable to only include adjectives in your lessons that are frequently used in combination with the noun weather.

Step 5: Categorizing your research results

As a last step, you need to categorize your results in order to use them for your lesson preparation. Table 1 serves as an example of what such a categorization could look like:

Table 1: How to describe the weather in different ways (neutral, positive, negative)

Describing the weather in a neutral way	Describing the weather in a subjective way (positive)	Describing the weather in a subjective way (negative)
The weather is … warm cold hot stormy windy sunny chilly	The weather is … nice perfect good great beautiful lovely fine	The weather is … bad terrible horrible awful

3.1.2 Task creation – Designing corpus-based teaching materials

3.1.2.1 Warm-up activity

Step 6: Creating a warm-up activity in the form of a dialogue

As an introduction and warm-up activity, you can create a fictional dialogue between yourself as the teacher and a fictional person or the class mascot, talking about your plans for the holidays. At this point, it has to be noted that the pupils should already be familiar with typical vocabulary, phrases and sentence structures that can be used to greet somebody. Ideally, information regarding these phrases, sentence structures and vocabulary has also been derived from a corpus in previous lesson preparations. The warm-up activity thus serves both as a revision of old knowledge and as an introduction to new skills and vocabulary. The introductory dialogue could look like this:

Teacher: Hey (name of class mascot)! How are you?

Mascot: Hello Mr./Mrs. (name of teacher). I’m good, thanks. How are you?

Teacher: I’m good, too. What are you going to do in your holidays?

Mascot: I’m going to (country/city).

Teacher: Wow, you are going to (country/city)? That sounds like a lot of fun! How’s the weather in (country/city)?

Mascot: It’s chilly in (country/city).

Teacher: Brrrr, I don’t like cold weather.

Mascot: What are you going to do in your holidays then?

Teacher: I’m going to (country/city).

Mascot: How’s the weather in (country/city) then?

Teacher: It’s nice and warm so I can go to the beach!

Mascot: That sounds like a great plan!

Alternatively, you can also show an appropriate video in which people are talking about the weather and afterwards ask your pupils what the video was about. However, it can be quite difficult and time-consuming to find a video that is suitable for this particular warm-up activity. Therefore, it is advisable to create such a fictional dialogue.

3.1.2.2 First task

Step 7: Creating word and picture cards

The warm-up activity provides the transition to the first task, which introduces new vocabulary. To create the material for this task, create picture cards that correspond to the adjectives listed in Table 1. All the cliparts used in this chapter are from https://publicdomainvectors.org and have the Common Creative license CC0.

Fig. 12: Example word and picture cards (clip arts: https://publicdomainvectors.org)

3.1.2.3 Second task

Step 8: Designing a dice template

The second task aims to motivate the pupils to actually use the vocabulary in a dialogue or other forms of communication with the help of a weather dice featuring the clip arts you already used in order to design your picture cards. You can either create the ready-to-use dice on your own or provide your pupils with a template they can cut out and glue together. Such a template could look like this:

Fig. 13: Example dice template (clip arts: https://publicdomainvectors.org)

3.1.2.4 Third task

Step 9: Selecting a weather report video and designing play cards

The third task can be introduced by a weather report. Try to find a short weather report that can be easily understood by beginners of the English language and that, at the same time, can also be fun and motivating for primary school pupils. A great example is the following video by Maple Leaf Learning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpBuaU5OPi8.

Based on this video, you can create play cards that illustrate the weather in different cities/countries and include a question to ask. You can use the same clip arts used in the picture cards pinned to the board during the first session.

Fig. 14: Example play cards (clip arts: https://publicdomainvectors.org)

3.2 Lesson sequence

Table 2: Lesson sequence “How’s the weather?”

Lesson	Task	Implementation	Interaction form	Medium/Material
1	Warm-up activity	Revision of previously acquired vocabulary, introduction of new vocabulary	Plenum	Fictional dialogue (or video), class mascot
	First task: Asking about the weather	The pupils work out the sentence structure of How’s the weather (in…)? and the corresponding answer. They familiarize themselves with this question and its possible answers.	Plenum (possibly sitting in a circle)	Word cards, picture cards
2	Second task: Consolidating and deepening the pupils’ knowledge	In pairs, pupils make use of the weather dice. One pupil asks the question How’s the weather? The other throws the dice and gives the corresponding answer.	Pairs	Weather dice/dice templates
3	Third task: Creating a classroom conversation about the weather	All class members work together and ask each other how the weather is in a certain city/country they want to travel to. The different play cards appoint one city/country and the corresponding information to a pupil.	Plenum	Weather report video, play cards
*	Additional task: Creating a weather report	With the help of some pre-fabricated sentence structures, the pupils create their own fictional weather reports.	Pairs or small groups	Worksheet with sentence structures/chunks, camera/tablet
*	Additional task: Working on a weather diary	After the first lessons, the pupils can start collecting daily information about the weather and record their observations in the form of a diary.	Individual work	Weather diary with pages for each day of the remaining unit and a page with supporting sentence structures/chunks

4 Options and further ideas

Having completed the first steps of the unit presented in this chapter, pupils could also be encouraged to further develop or deepen their acquired skills by creating their own weather report or weather diary. The report could be produced in groups. The word and picture cards introduced beforehand, as well as cards with supporting sentence structures, may serve as additional support for weaker pupils. The sentence structures on the support cards may be based on the weather report video, which will already be familiar to the pupils from task 3.

The weather diary could also be part of the pupils’ homework. The pages for the first few days may contain sentences with gaps that simply need to be filled in. As pupils progress, the design of the pages could them become more independent in writing their weather diary entries. By the end of the diary, pupils should be able to fill a page entirely on their own. Entries could include general information about the current weather situation, as well as information regarding the temperature or the next day’s weather forecast.

Fig. 15: Example pages for the beginning of the weather diary task (clip arts: https://publicdomainvectors.org)

5 Caveats and limitations

Fig. 16: How to continue your research without creating a paid premium account

When using english-copora.org to derive data for the purpose of designing teaching materials, some difficulties might be encountered. Firstly, a free account on this platform only allows the user to conduct a limited number of searches per day. In addition, after having used the searching tools for a while, a notification informing you about the possibility to upgrade your account will be displayed (Fig. 16).

If this notification appears on your screen, you simply need to wait for a few seconds. Then, a new button appears, which enables you to continue your search without creating a premium account.

Secondly, there are three ways of obtaining the clip arts that you will need for the tasks described in this chapter. You can either create them yourself, buy them from an illustrator or make use of open educational resources. In the latter two cases, it is mandatory that you are aware of and follow the respective copyright guidelines of the clip arts that you use. If you buy your clip arts from an illustrator, you are often only allowed to use them for your own personal crafting and classroom use. Thus, you are generally neither allowed to share these clip arts nor use them commercially. Consequently, if you intend to publish and resell your teaching materials, it is advisable to make use of open, publicly accessible educational resources. They are openly licensed, which means that users are allowed to reuse and even publish these materials and resources in their own works. The clip arts included in this chapter are open educational resources, too, and are covered by the Common Creative license CC0.

Lastly, it should be noted that there are different ways of how to ask somebody about the weather. It is also possible, for example, to ask What is the weather like today? Depending on which corpus you use and which kind of language data this corpus is based on (British or American English, spoken or written English, etc.) your data collection results may well differ from the ones presented in this chapter (see section 3.1.1). We deliberately decided to only introduce one way of asking about the weather in our proposed tasks because there is a high probability that pupils will otherwise mix several variants, thereby creating unidiomatic questions, e.g.,*How’s the weather like today? Nevertheless, it is, of course, possible to set the same tasks using the question What is the weather like today? or any other idiomatic expression.

6 Conclusion

This chapter has shown that working with corpora enables teachers to design innovative and authentic teaching materials and thus allows pupils to acquire useful, idiomatic phrases for conversations in English. Though the data compilation process may initially seem quite time-consuming and more complex than working with a conventional textbook, working with corpora can compensate for some of the weaknesses of the materials traditionally used in the primary school classroom (see section 1). However, in order to take advantage of these benefits, it is important to consider the appropriateness of the corpus chosen. Once collected, the corpus data can be easily stored and reused numerous times. Finally, the processes of collecting corpus data and developing motivating teaching materials on the basis of this data can be applied to any other topic of the EFL classroom that aims to enable (primary school) pupils to acquire communicative competences based on authentic English.

7 Resources and references

Corpus of American Soap Operas. https://www.english-corpora.org/soap/ (25 February, 2021).

Maple Leaf Learning. 2011. International Weather Report – Simple Skits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpBuaU5OPi8 (25 February, 2021).

Public Domain Vectors. https://publicdomainvectors.org (25 February, 2021).

Cambridge Online Dictionary. 2020. Lemma. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/lemma (04 August, 2020).

Jones, Christian & Tania Horak. 2014. Leave it out! The use of soap operas as models of spoken discourse in the ELT classroom. Journal of Language Teaching and Learning 4(1). 1-14.

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2006. Kerncurriculum für die Grundschule, Schuljahrgänge 3-4: Englisch. https://docplayer.org/11297531-Niedersaechsisches-kultusministerium-kerncurriculum-fuer-die-grundschule-schuljahrgaenge-3-4-englischnieder-sachsen.html (25 February, 2021).

O’Keeffe, Anne, Michael McCarthy & Ronald Carter. 2007. From corpus to classroom language use and language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Quaglio, Paulo. 2009. Television dialogue: The sitcom Friends vs natural conversation. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Surkamp, Carola & Britta Viebrock (eds.). 2018. Teaching English as a foreign language: An introduction. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.

Thaler, Engelbert. 2012. Englisch unterrichten: Grundlagen, Kompetenzen, Methoden. Berlin: Cornelsen.

1 Introduction and rationale

This example instruction, taken from a secondary school English coursebook widely used in Germany, illustrates that textbooks often focus on the learning of individual words, while the teaching of idiomatic phrases frequently comes short. The proposed lesson follows a different approach to language learning, in which the learner learns to think in linguistic chunks. It provides language learners with the necessary scaffolding to successfully go from learning new words to using them in context.

This chapter provides teachers with tasks that are close to students‘ reality and are connected to the newly learned expressions. In accordance with the overall aim of communicative language teaching, the students discuss travel plans in the form of text messages, explore strong collocations in written and spoken language and analyse the structures of a selection of phrases. As intended by the curriculum of Lower Saxony (Germany), students learn how to give information and make plans in English in an interactive context (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 17-18) with the help of chunks and common expressions that they gather from authentic, yet simple language. The focus lies on verb-noun and prepositional collocates.

The proposed lesson aims to support students in becoming autonomous language learners by means of scaffolding. When working with younger students and corpora, there is a fine line between student-corpus interaction and information overload, so the research tasks are kept simple (cf. Friginal 2018: 168). According to the local curriculum, students are to learn how to use various writing resources and tools in order to become increasingly independent (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 20).

For teachers, this chapter provides a step-by-step guide on how to find authentic chunks, questions, and example sentences for communicative travel situations, how to visualise and use them in class. The following corpus tasks encourage students to think beyond the labels of “correct” and “incorrect” language use, and to explore the special features of spoken English.

2 Corpus, tools and methods

Content-wise, the lesson follows the idea of learning to use collocates in context. On a methodological level, its aim is to help learners become proficient users of the corpus tool SkeLL. SkeLL is a free corpus tool specifically designed for language learners created by Sketch Engine. It offers a very intuitive user-friendly interface, which makes it highly suitable for learner-corpus interaction. Another positive aspect is that the tool functions well on smartphones so that it is not even necessary to set up laptops in class.

From intermediate proficiency level onwards, secondary school students should be encouraged to reflect on their language use more autonomously in order to become independent language learners. In the proposed lesson, students get the opportunity to work with a corpus tool and to do research themselves, which encourages language awareness and promises to be highly motivating.

The first function used for the analysis is the “Word sketch” function. It provides users with lists of words surrounding the search word, arranged in categories (collocating verbs, nouns, adjectives etc.). This means that it is possible to instantly see the most typically used verbs which have the search word as object. The corpus tool also offers example sentences including the search word, which provides learners with information on how the word appears in context.

The corpora used for the lesson are the ones preloaded on SkeLL: they “contain a varied collection of texts such as news, academic papers, Wikipedia articles, open-source books, web pages, discussion forums, blogs, etc. to provide a good example of how language is used in everyday, standard, formal and professional context” (www.sketchengine.eu/SkeLL/).

In addition, this chapter provides step-by-step instructions to creating a worksheet with Sketch Engine, which is a commercial platform and therefore only accessible with an account beyond the 30-day trial period, but which offers a wider choice of corpora and corpus functions that may prove very useful for teachers.

3 Step-by-step guide

3.1 Teacher preparation

It is advisable to give students an introduction on corpora, the SkeLL tool and its functions in advance. The teacher and each student (or student pair) need a device connected to the internet. A laptop would be ideal, but SkeLL also works on mobile devices. This corpus platform is not used for the warm-up or the pre-task.

3.1.1 Collecting expressions for worksheet 1

Open SkeLL in your internet browser (https://skell.sketchengine.eu/#home).

Fig. 1: SkeLL search

Fig. 2: Search options

Make sure to select “English” next to the search bar (Fig. 1). Type in a keyword, for example bus. Click on “bus in Word Sketch” in the appearing drop-down menu or select “Word sketch” after having started the search (Fig. 2). The word sketch then provides you with a well-structured overview of the strongest collocations of this keyword.

Select “noun” in the task bar to search only for phrases with bus as the noun (Fig. 3). This is particularly important for words like train that are also verbs.

Fig. 3: Settings

For task 1, you want to find verbs that are strongly associated with bus as an object, so focus on that column first (Fig. 4). It displays a variety of verbs you can choose from. Caution: not all verb listed will be relevant to your task. It is the teacher’s responsibility to explain to the class why some collocates might not fit the task: e.g., if we are looking for verb-noun collocations related to the topic of travelling, articulate, park and drive, all of which are also among the strongest collocates of bus, are not relevant.

Fig. 4: Column “verbs with ‘bus’ as object”

To see example phrases that feature one of these collocations, click on the collocate (e.g., catch) (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5: Concordance lines with catch and bus

You can collect phrases suitable for your students for worksheet 2 on SkeLL (cf. section 4.1.1). The example phrases in example worksheet 2 were, however, taken from the Web English 2018 corpus using the Sketch Engine platform. Because of its considerably larger range of corpora and options, teachers will find many more examples there, so they can more easily vary the level of tasks. However, its interface is not as user-friendly as SkeLL, so this tool may be more suitable for research purposes and teacher preparation than for student-corpus interaction. Below, you will find a step-by-step guide for teachers for finding good examples on Sketch Engine.

3.1.2 Finding phrases for Worksheet 2 with Sketch Engine

3.1.2.1 Registeration and login on Sketch Engine

Create an account on Sketch Engine or log in with your institutional account (Fig. 6). Participating EU institutions can access the tool for free until 2022 through the ELEXIS project. Note that, unless your school is taking part in this project, Sketch Engine is not free to use. There is, however, a 30–day free trial option.

Fig. 6: Sketch Engine log in screen

The Sketch Engine dashboard provides you with an overview of all the platform’s key functions.

3.1.2.2 Selecting a suitable corpus and using the “Word sketch” function

In the search bar at the top of the dashboard view, select the English Web 2018 corpus (enTenTen18) (Fig. 7). With over 21 billion words, it is considerably bigger than other corpora. Note that the texts contained in the corpus are not only produced by native English speakers. Considering the size of the corpus, though, this is unlikely to have an impact on the search results.

Fig. 7: Corpus selection

Just like SkeLL, Sketch Engine can be used to create word sketches. Select this function on the left side of the dashboard view. Then, select the “Advanced search” tab in the top bar. Type a noun referring to a means of transportation (e.g., bus) into the search bar. Sketch Engine will search for bus as a lemma, meaning that it will search for both singular and plural forms of the word. Select “noun” as the part of speech below the search bar. Click “GO” to start the search (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8: Word sketch and advanced search

The symbols in the top–right corner help you organise your results. Click on the eye symbol to sort the collocations according to their collocational strength if you want the results to look like they do on SkeLL, which always displays the strongest, most typical collocates of a certain keyword. If you sort by frequency, many of the collocates listed in the word sketch will probably be words which occur with a high frequency in the language in general (e.g., take or get). Choose the option that meets your requirements best or, for a good mixture, you can even use both (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9: View options for the word sketch

3.1.2.3 Exploring concordances

Again, focus on the column “verbs with ‘bus’ as object”. To see how the verb-noun collocations are used in context, click on “…” next to a collocate and open the concordance lines for “bus + catch” in a new tab for a better overview (Fig. 10).

Fig. 10: Column “verbs with ‘bus’ as object” and further options

It is advisable to select a random sample of 100 or 200. Click on the question mark symbol in the toolbar above, then click “GO” (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11: Random sample

Select “KWIC” to see the collocation “bus + catch” used in a larger context, with the keyword bus displayed in the centre (Fig. 12). If you prefer to see the collocation used in complete sentences, select the option “Sentence” (Fig. 13).

Fig. 12: The “KWIC” function

Fig. 13: The “Sentence” function

Click on “bus” to see the extended context of the concordance line. You can see an even larger excerpt by clicking on “…” at the top or at the bottom of the of the paragraph (Fig. 14). Pick single sentences or short dialogue excerpts you want to include in your worksheet.

Fig. 14: Extended context of concordances

3.1.2.4 Finding “good dictionary examples”

This function helps you to filter the concordances to find shorter, simpler example sentences. Click on the “Good dictionary examples” symbol in the toolbar, then click “GO” (Fig. 15). You can always undo certain steps of your search or go back and forth between your steps. Click on the “x” displayed in the search history above to undo a step (Fig. 16).

Fig. 15: Settings for “good dictionary examples”

Fig. 16: “Good dictionary examples”

4 Lesson plan

4.1 Instructions

Begin the lesson with a short warm-up activity. Students tell their neighbours how they travelled to a place they have visited before. Ask students to name means of transport and show them verbs that might appear in combination with the nouns. In the following work phase, the class conducts their own research using SkeLL to find out which verbs and nouns are commonly used as collocations in English for giving directions.

Before the class starts to work independently in pairs, present an exemplary search on SkeLL by sharing your screen and projecting it onto the wall or the whiteboard. It is important to highlight that the students should focus on the context of the collocations, i.e., the example sentences in which the search words appear. Worksheet 1 provides the students with a step-by-step guide on how to conduct the research and tells them which words to search for.

On the basis of the corpus tasks, the students transfer their findings to a written dialogue in which they give directions to an exchange student (see worksheet 3). By writing out the dialogue rather than giving directions verbally, learners cannot include gestures and point at directions or things, but are forced to use their (newly acquired) vocabulary to communicate. Nevertheless, if there is time left, let single pairs of students read out – or even act out – their chat messages.

4.1.1 Tasks

Fig. 17: Worksheet 1 – Doing your own corpus research

Fig. 18: Worksheet 2 – Analysing sentence structures

Fig. 19: Worksheet 3 – “How do I get to your house?”

4.1.2 Follow-up activities

Another idea is to plan a real class trip together with the group. The students could create a flyer or a travel guide in which they give directions and conduct more research on the topic of travelling on SkeLL. Let students research what other aspects might be relevant when planning a trip and create more word sketches related to the topic. If there is a bit more time, it might also be interesting to search online for authentic public transport connections and practise giving corresponding directions. This would encourage students to focus on relevant information and to filter them according to their needs.

The proposed corpus activities might also serve as an introduction to the topic of travelling: following the ideas presented in this chapter, students could use the corpus tool to collect information on various destinations (cities, countries, sights, etc.), learn new adjectives to describe a trip or an event and use their knowledge to write a travel report, blog post or a diary entry.

5 Options and further ideas

The corpus tasks designed for this lesson allow for differentiation: teachers can decide how much scaffolding is needed, depending on the group of learners. For instance, the list of verb collocations might be prepared by the teacher or else be collected and developed by the learners themselves. Moreover, it is possible to let students find their own example sentences in SkeLL for further analysis of concordance lines. For the production task, some students can be challenged to create the whole dialogue themselves.

For a more realistic setting, it is possible to use exchange platforms like Erasmus eTwinning so that students can communicate with other English learners across Europe, or let students chat with their classmates in an online format.

5.1 Additional tools and functions to create more advanced tasks

5.1.1 Analysing concordances

The “Concordance” function is useful for finding language patterns for task design or for demonstrating certain language structures. More advanced language learners or corpus-experienced students could use this function to explore sentence structures on their own.

Select the “Word sketch” option and search for a word as explained in section 3.1.2.2. Open the concordance lines (cf. section 3.1.2.3). Within the concordance section, click on the “Collocations” symbol, i.e., the three dots at the top of the page (Fig. 20).

Fig. 20: The “Collocations” function

If you want to find the most frequent word forms right next to the keywords catch + bus, for instance, select the first position on the right side. Click “GO” (Fig. 21).

Fig. 21: Specifying the position of the collocates

You will then be presented with a list of the most frequent words directly following the collocation catch + bus. In Fig. 22, you can see that these are almost exclusively prepositions.

Fig. 22: List of the most frequent words to the right

Once again, you can open the respective concordance lines by selecting one (or several) collocates and clicking on “show concordances” at the bottom of the page (Fig. 23)

Fig. 23: Show concordances

5.1.2 Multi-word search

Go to the “Word sketch” function and search for a word (cf. section 3.1.2.2). Open the concordance lines (cf. section 3.1.2.3). Within the concordance section, click on the “Change criteria” symbol (Fig. 24).

Fig. 24: Changing the search criteria

In the “Advanced search” settings, click on “Filter context” and tick “Part-of-speech context” (Fig. 25). This function allows you to search for an additional wordform that occurs in the same sentence as, e.g., bus and take.

Fig. 25: Multi-word search

A drop-down menu for choosing the part(s) of speech you want to search for will appear. As an example, search for all prepositional phrases associated with the collocation take + bus. These are good exemplary phrases for further analysis. To do this, click “all” and tick “preposition” in the drop-down menu. To specify the position of the prepositional phrase relative to the keywords, select “1” Tokens “right” and click “GO” (Fig. 26). Sketch Engine will then only display concordances with prepositional phrases occurring immediately to the right of the collocation (Fig. 27).

Fig. 26: Multiword search settings

Fig. 27: Multi-word search results

5.1.3 Visualisation

Another nice feature is the “Visualisation” function on Sketch Engine.

Fig. 28: Visualisation symbol

Visualising the word sketch (e.g., for demonstration purposes) can be easily done by way of the student-friendly, interactive visualisation tool on Sketch Engine. Open the word sketch interface and search for a word (cf. section 3.1.2.2). Click on the “Show visualization” symbol in the toolbar (Fig. 28).  For a better overview, select only the categories you want to show and adjust the number of collocations you want to display until you are satisfied with the visualisation (cf. Fig. 29).

Fig. 29: Visualising the word sketch

The image is downloadable. Hover over one area with your cursor to highlight just one on the categories. This could help students formulate their own sentences, for example in task 3 of the lesson outlined in section 4.

6 Conclusion

Corpus-based task design is still primarily found in academic contexts. In this chapter, we intended to show how corpus tools can also be used by language learners of lower proficiency. The approach introduced in this chapter is applicable to many more topics and levels. The idea is to encourage learners to explore new word fields by creating word sketches and analysing words in context by themselves. Students actively engage with new vocabulary in context instead of simply memorising lists of isolated words from the textbook.

Word sketches like the ones created in this lesson are a good way of discovering authentic chunks of speech that a textbook could not provide. In this chapter, we have shown that SkeLL is a simple, yet practical tool that can give learners the means to becoming autonomous language learners, whilst Sketch Engine with its variety of useful functions has an enormous potential for teachers, especially when creating further exercises and visualisations.

7 Resources and references

Baer-Engel, Jennifer et al. 2017. Green Line 4 G9. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag.

Friginal, Eric. 2018. Corpus linguistics for English teachers: New tools, online resources, and classroom activities. New York, NY: Routledge.

Lancaster University. Corpus for schools: ELT Materials. https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/corpusforschools/esl-teaching-materials/ (31 March, 2021).

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2015. Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium, Schuljahrgänge 5-10: Englisch. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?p=download&upload=139 (03 June, 2021)

SKELL – Sketch Engine for Language Learners. https://SkeLL.sketchengine.eu/#home.

Sketch Engine – Create and search a text corpus. www.sketchengine.eu.

1 Introduction and rationale

Communicative approaches to teaching English as a foreign or second language aim to enable learners to master key communicative situations such as going to a restaurant, shopping, asking for directions, etc. As such, it is necessary to give students the opportunity to come into contact with authentic spoken language as opposed to the largely written-language-based and often unidiomatic materials presented in school textbooks. With this in mind, this chapter applies a communicative teaching approach by teaching students how to give, accept and refuse invitations in a socially accepted manner. This teaching objective is in line with our local secondary school curriculum, which states that students should be able to invite somebody and to respond to invitations (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 17). This chapter provides teachers with a detailed step-by-step guide on how to access and compile idiomatic spoken language material by conducting their own corpus linguistics research and how to process this material for teaching purposes. It thus shows how idiomatic spoken language use can form the basis of diverse communicative and meaningful learner activities, which prepare students for communicative encounters outside the classroom.

2 Corpus, tools and methods

Quaglio (2009: 148-149) advocates the use of television dialogue as a surrogate for natural conversation, adding that “it offers a vast potential for pedagogical purposes”. Accordingly, the Corpus of American Soap Operas was selected for this lesson. It contains 100 million words of spoken American English from ten US soap operas from the early 2000s and is freely accessible via english-corpora.org. Note that, unlike many spoken corpora, which feature adult, uncensored spoken language, the Corpus of American Soap Operas is especially adequate for selecting language material for younger learners, as it does not include any swear words. To use the english-corpora.org, users will need to register. The free account only offers a limited number of searches per day but this is sufficient for teaching purposes.

The corpus research conducted by the teacher as part of the preparation for this lesson focuses on the KWIC functions of english-corpora.org. This function is particularly useful because it can help to counter the “over-emphasis in language teaching on single words” (O’Keeffe et al. 2007: 63); and to make students aware that “the meaning of a word is as much a matter of how it combines with other words in actual use” (Firth 1935 in O’Keeffe et al. 2007: 59).

3 Step-by-step guide

3.1 Teacher preparation – data collection

Step 1: Registering on english-corpora.org

To access the Corpus of American Soap Operas, connect to www.english-corpora.org and select the corpus by clicking on it (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Accessing the Corpus of American Soap Operas.

If you are curious to find out more about the different soaps included in the corpus, click on the “sheet-of-paper symbol” (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Further information on the corpus.

Step 2: Compiling corpus data with the “KWIC” function

The “Keyword in Context” (KWIC) function enables you to see in which context a keyword, occurs. First, type in the keyword, in this case invite. Second, select the words by which you want to sort your search. Select L for 1, 2, or 3 words to the left. Select R for 1, 2, or 3 words to the right. It is also possible, for example, to sort by one word to the left, then one and two words to the right. Note that you can click on the grey box with the asterisk to clear the entries and start over (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Conducting a KWIC search.

As a result of this sample search, you will obtain a list of 200 examples of the verb invite and the three words to its right (Fig. 4). Elements which belong to the same structural category are highlighted in the same colour, which will help you and your students to identify common patterns of usage.

Fig. 4: Results for the KWIC search of invite.

You may have observed that the search options, as displayed in Fig. 3, only returned the non-inflected verb form invite. In order to find representative examples including the different conjugated forms of the verb invite (e.g. he/she/it invites, he was invited) (Fig. 6), you need to search for the lemma invite. The lemma includes all conjugated verb forms such as inviting, invited, invites etc. To search for the lemma invite, type: [invite] or INVITE and click on “Keyword in Context (KWIC)” (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5: Lemma search for the verb invite.

Fig. 6: Results for lemma search invite.

Step 3: Searching for particular parts-of-speech

When looking for similar patterns, it is important to search for invite as either a noun or a verb in order to obtain comparable examples. This selection can be made by clicking on the light grey button “POS” (= Part-of-Speech) next to where the search term is entered (Fig. 7). A drop-down menu opens and “verb.all” or “noun.all” can be selected.

Fig. 7: Searching for a specific part of speech.

In the following you will find some results for exemplary searches of invite as a verb.

Fig. 8: Pattern invite sb to sth.

Fig. 9: Pattern invite sb in.

Fig. 10: Pattern invite + sb + over.

Fig. 11: Search settings for searching for invite as a noun.

Now also search for the nouns invite and invitation.

Fig. 12: Pattern invite + list.

Fig. 13: Search settings for searching for invitation as a noun.

Fig. 14: Search results for searching for the noun invitation.

Step 4: Documenting research results

Having familiarized yourself with the KWIC feature of the corpus and skimmed through the examples, you now need to select data suitable for your lesson which exemplify the speech act of “inviting somebody”. English-corpora.org offers you the useful option of creating your own lists containing only the examples which are most interesting or relevant for your teaching purposes. To save individual examples, simply click on all the examples that you would like to use in class (they will be highlighted in blue), give your list a name in the textbox (Number 4 in Fig. 15) and click on “SAVE LIST”. You can also add to lists that you have previously created by selecting the list name in the dropdown menu (Number 3 in Fig. 15).

Fig. 15: Saving lists of concordance lines.

One option is to save lists of useful frequent structures, e.g. invite + me/him/her/them + over/to, so that your students may inductively infer the underlying patterns based on the similarity of the examples. You can access your lists anytime. Choose the list you would like to access and click on “SAVE LIST” (Fig. 16).

Fig. 16: Accessing a saved list.

Fig. 17: The “saved list” for invite + along.

Alternatively, you may copy the examples and/or the expanded contexts into an empty Word document to use this data for the preparation of teaching material. Either way, you should document your research results as it forms the basis for preparing your teaching materials.

Step 5: Categorizing research results

Based on your research results, you can now categorize the examples you selected according to your teaching objectives. The table below presents such an example categorization.

3.2 Teacher preparation – designing corpus-based teaching materials

Warm-up

Step 6: Selecting a video scene of an invitational act

For the warm-up activity, select an appropriate invitation scene, ideally from one of the soaps in the corpus. The expanded context information of a specific concordance line as illustrated below (Fig. 18), includes information about the date on which this specific scene was first broadcasted. Therefore, you may try to search the internet to find this specific episode, though this can be a time-consuming task! Alternatively, search for an alternative invitation scene on YouTube, e.g. from the soap “All my children” (on YouTube, search for: “All my children invitation”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3awzuCGbqqo.

Fig. 18: Broadcasting information.

Pre-task

Step 7: Preparing playing cards

This interactive pre-task is designed to focus the students’ attention onto the diverse contexts, in which the two most basic terms linked to the topic of invitation (invite and invitation) may occur. To create the pre-task material, access your list(s) of examples which you have saved on the English-corpora website (step 4) or as the Word document you created. Split a selection of these sentences into meaningful chunks of two to five words. Print or write the individual chunks onto large, colourful cards.

First task

Step 8: Designing a worksheet based on the KWIC material

For the first task, you need to design a worksheet based on the corpus data which you compiled through your KWIC research (Step 2). Basically, you provide the students with blocks of examples which illustrate recurrent patterns.

Fig. 19: Example worksheet for the first task.

Please note that Fig. 19 is a sample worksheet and that you should add further examples.

Second task

Step 9: Designing role-play cards

While the first task focused the students’ attention on patterns of usage, the second task aims to motivate students to actively use these patterns in communication. In order to achieve this aim, it is recommended to create role-play cards. The corpus data you collected (in the form of concordance lines and their expanded contexts) offer numerous example situations which you can use for creating the cards. You can either directly copy the “expanded context” onto the cards if the situation is clear enough that way, or rephrase and summarize the depicted scene in a couple of sentences if necessary. While the situation is presented on the back of the card, the front side states the topic of the situation e.g. “Refusing an invitation” (Table 3).

Third task

Step 10: Formulating the final task of the session

The final task of the session requires the students to practise using the structural patterns and phrases they have learned over the course of the session in writing by designing an invitation card (Fig. 20).

Fig. 20: Example Invitation Card Task (http://pixabay.com).

Lesson plan

Instructions

Pre-Task: Language chunk cards

The idea is to pin a number of sentence “chunks” onto the board. In a class of 24 students, form four groups of six students. Within their groups, the students discuss and guess which of the chunks presented on the board belong together. Each group then sends one group member to the board to reorganize the chunks in the correct order. The group results are then discussed in class and secured on the board.

First task: Discovery learning of key patterns

In this task, students work through the worksheet designed in 3.2.3 individually or in pairs. Depending on the class, time resources and classroom facilities, this task could also be redesigned as a hands-on Data-Driven-Learning (DDL) task. In this case, the students themselves work online with the corpus. This, of course, means that they need access to computers and should have received a general introduction to corpus research similar to the one provided for teachers in this chapter. If these requirements can be met, the students work “hands-on” with the corpus in order to discover structural patterns. Instead of being given the pre-selected corpus data, they can investigate and select examples sentences themselves.

Second task: Role-plays

The class is split into pairs of two students: each pair receives approximately ten role-play cards; the students then have to act out the described situation by choosing appropriate phrases/patterns to talk about invitations. They can use the worksheet; especially task 1b (see worksheet Fig. 20) may help them to decide which structure to use in which situation.

Third task: Invitation cards

This task can conclude the lesson or, alternatively, be set as homework. Weaker students may be provided with an example invitation text to support them in this task.

4 Options and further ideas

As an extension to the invitation card writing task, students can “invite” each other to their parties and then accept or refuse invitations on the basis of a roll of the dice. The number on the dice can be suggested by the students and then summarized on the board.

Further follow-up lessons could focus students’ attention on the degree of politeness in various invitation scenes, particularly with regard to the modal verbs used to express politeness. The following combinations are particularly frequent in the corpus:

• Would + invitation
• Would love to + invite
• Couldn’t + invite
• May + invite
• Should + invite
• Should have a party
• Ought to + invite

The following search (Fig. 21) can help to find the most frequent modal verb + invite patterns.

Fig. 21: Finding modal verbs in the context of invitations.

5 Caveats and limitations

Difficulties might occur when working with the Corpus of American Soap Operas via the interface english-corpora.org for the first time. Non-paying users will regularly receive a notification to upgrade their account (Fig. 22).

Fig. 22: Notification to upgrade.

This notification may be disregarded, but requires a little patience. Having waited for a few seconds, users then have the option to continue their search without upgrading (Fig. 23).

Fig. 23: How to continue a search without agreeing to upgrade.

6 Conclusion

Even though the initial preparation of this lesson based on self-compiled corpus data is more time-consuming than ordinary lesson preparation, this chapter has shown that the time investment is worth the effort. The preparation time will continuously decrease as teachers become more experienced in working with corpora. Once collected, the corpus data can be reused numerous times and the procedure can easily be applied to any other topic which aims at teaching students how to master communicative situations; it is even applicable to other foreign languages. Teachers of Spanish, for example, may want to consult www.corpusdelespanol.org, whose interface will look very familiar to experienced users of english-corpora.org since it is based on the same software.

7 Resources and references

AMCthroughtheyears. 2014. All My Children – 1999 – An Invitation to the Crystal Ball. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3awzuCGbqqo (3 December, 2020).

Baer-Engel, Jennifer, Carolyn Jones, Harald Weisshaar, Alison Wooder, Cornelia Kaminski, Elise Köhler-Davidson, Katja Krey, Friderike Ulmer & Bernd Wick. 2017. Green Line 4 [Schülerband]: Für Klasse 9 an Gymnasien (Bundesausgabe Ab 2014). Harald Weisshaar (ed.). Stuttgart; Leipzig: Ernst Klett Verlag.

Corpus of American Soap Operas. https://www.english-corpora.org/soap/

Harger, Laurence & Cecile Niemitz-Rossant. 2016. English G – Access. 4, [Schülerband]. Jörg Rademacher (ed.). Berlin: Cornelsen.

1 Introduction

The verbs say and tell have a similar meaning and, in German, both can be translated as sagen. As a result, German-speaking learners of English tend to use the grammar of these words synonymously and frequently produce unidiomatic phrases like she told to me or my teacher said me that. In fact, this problem is not confined to German-speaking learners of English: it is common to many Learner Englishes – as attested, for example, in the Longman Dictionary of Errors (Turton & Heaton 1997). To counter this difficulty, the following lesson focusses on the different grammatical structures of the two verbs, which the students will ascertain from authentic language samples. Students benefit from a corpus-based approach to learning about these two reporting verbs because corpora provide them with authentic language material. Knowing how to work with corpus analysis tools and being able to interpret the extracted data can positively contribute to students’ learning strategies and learner autonomy. 

Justification for applying such an approach can be found in the curriculum of Lower Saxony as it encourages teachers to include a variety of learning strategies in their teaching:

Lernstrategien beziehen sich auf den Erwerb der sprachlichen Mittel und bezeichnen die Strategien, die ein Lerner zunehmend selbstständig und individuell unterschiedlich verwendet, um sich Sprache anzueignen [Learning strategies refer to the acquisition of linguistic resources and describe the strategies that a learner uses to acquire a language with increasing autonomy and individual variation] (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 27).

Furthermore, the proposed lesson unit supports learning awareness (“Lernbewusstsein”) as the students learn autonomously and discover rules by themselves: “Die Schülerinnen und Schüler […] finden Regeln, erkennen Fehler in Selbstkorrektur sowie peer correction und nutzen diese Erkenntnisse für den eigenen Lernprozess” [Students […] identify rules, recognize errors by correcting themselves or through peer correction and make use of this knowledge for their own learning process] (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 28).

2 Corpus/corpora, tools and methods

As “educational systems in European countries generally […] follow the British English model” (Naser Eddine 2011: 8), the British National Corpus (BNC) will be used to provide the necessary information for this lesson. The corpus can be freely accessed via https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/. The different uses of this corpus analysis tool include “finding the frequency of words, phrases, and collocates” and “designing authentic language teaching materials and resources” (English Corpora: Most Widely Used Online Corpora. Billions of Words of Data: free Online Access, n.d.). To find out about the grammatical differences of tell and say, the students will work with the List and Collocates functions (cf. 3.3, step-by-step Instructions).  

This lesson focusses on the verbs tell and say, which are introduced to German learners of English in 5^th, or at the latest in 6^th grade – which is the reason why this lesson was created for sixth-grade students. Once the students know both words, they should be made aware that tell and say have different grammatical structures that cannot be used synonymously. By working with a corpus, the students will learn to extract rules from authentic language data. This data-driven learning approach teaches the students how to work with the basic analysis features of a corpus tool. In the following years, more detailed and complex corpus queries can be introduced, which will build on the abilities the students have already developed. In the context of this project, a worksheet was developed that enables the students to work autonomously, with five tasks and corresponding step-by-step instructions. It can be found at the end of this chapter.

3 Step-by-step guide

3.1 Teacher preparation

1. Become familiar with https://www.english-corpora.org/. Work through the worksheet yourself to be able to help your students.
2. In case you think there are too many or too few tasks, you can adjust the number according to the group of learners.
3. Does the task level match your students’ skills, or might they need assistance? This is the time to think about scaffolding. Here are some ideas:

• • You could hang up a poster with the word classes on it. This could help your students in case they are not familiar with the word classes (cf. worksheet, task 3).
  • You could prepare cards containing helpful phrases (see worksheet, task 5) or beginnings of sentences (see worksheet, additional task) that the students can get from you in case they need support.

4. For a successful introduction into the lesson, draw a connection to the previous one(s), so that the students know what will happen and why. You could think about questions like: 

• • Did the students have problems distinguishing tell and say?
  • Did the students ask you to explain the differences between the two verbs?

5. The conclusion period should be used to compare the students’ results to see if there are any questions left and to draw a conclusion from the lesson.

• • What do I want my students to learn? What is most important to remember?
  • You could reflect on the lesson together with your students. Did they like working with a corpus autonomously? What kind of problems did they encounter?
  • Explaining how using a corpus could improve their future learning processes. 

6. Add your thoughts and ideas to the provided lesson plan (cf. 3.2, lesson plan) to adjust this lesson introduction and conclusion to individual learner needs.
7. Especially if this is the first time that your students are going to work with a corpus, you should briefly introduce them to what a corpus is and what can be done with it beforehand, e.g., in the preceding lesson. That way, you can avoid overwhelming them with too much information at the beginning of this practical corpus-based lesson.

3.2 Lesson Plan

3.3 Step-by-Step Instructions

In case you are working with a corpus for the first time yourself, the following step-by-step instructions will walk you through everything you need to know for this lesson. The instructions are in chronological order based on the attached worksheet. Furthermore, there are a few additional instructions (marked with an *) to extent your basic knowledge of this web interface. This might be helpful if you want to expand the work with corpora, or if you search for different words and find out that another function might be more beneficial to reach the learning goal.

Selecting a Corpus

Open the website https://www.english-corpora.org and select the British National Corpus (BNC) (Fig. 1).

*You will find a listing of different corpora on the opening page. Should you be working with this analysis tool again, pick the one that is most suitable for your lesson.

Fig. 1: Where to find the BNC on the homepage

If you have an account, you can log in under “My account” and “Log in”. If you do not have an account yet, you will find the “Register” button on top (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Logging in to english-corpora.org

Looking for Frequency

Now, you will find yourself on the SEARCH interface. On this screen, insert the word/words you are looking for. When you click on the grey words below the search box, another box with further information will pop up on the right-hand side (Fig. 3 and 4).

Fig. 3: The SEARCH screen and functions

Fig. 4: How to display the number of results into frequency per million

To find out how often a word is used, simply enter the word into the white box and click on “Find matching strings”. The website will forward you to the FREQUENCY screen (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5: The FREQUENCY screen

This interface displays the results of the search in the column “FREQ” and the column “PER MIL”. When you click on the word “TELL” (Fig. 5), the website jumps to the CONTEXT interface and provides a full list of the sentences that your search results can be found in (the concordance lines).

Lemmas

The frequency search only shows results that match the exact word form that has been written. In order to get results that contain all variants of the words (e.g., different tense and grammatical forms) the lemma search will be the best option. To do so, you simply enter the specific words in capital letters on the SEARCH interface (Fig. 6). 

Fig. 6: The lemma search function

By confirming your entry by clicking on “Find matching strings”, you will be forwarded to the FREQUENCY interface, which displays the different variants in descending order (Fig. 7). 

Fig. 7: Results of the lemma search 

Collocations

Click on “SEARCH” in the top left corner to go back to the opening page. Otherwise, repeat “selecting a corpus”. To find out which words appear alongside say and tell, click on the Collocates function (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8: The Collocates function

The task on the worksheet aims to find out how the two verbs occur with to. Therefore, tell (or say) needs to be written into the “Word/phrase” box and to into the “Collocates” box. In addition, you will also need to choose a number on the scale which indicates the positions in which the collocate appears in relation to the word. If you click on a number on the left-hand side of the numeric scale, you will get sentences that show the word to in front of tell. Clicking on a number on the right-hand side, you will get results where to occurs after tell. The given task requires to click on “3” to get results in which to appears within the following three words of tell (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9: Using the Collocates function

After clicking on “Find collocates”, the website forwards you to the FREQUENCY screen. This does not help much, as the task asks for examples. However, clicking on “TO” (Fig. 10) solves the problem and brings you straight to the CONTEXT page and to the concordance lines.

Fig. 10: How to get to the concordance lines

*The frequency interface is helpful if you want to find out which words collocate with the word/phrase in the search box. If you conduct a search like this, the FREQUENCY interface provides you with a table containing a list of the collocating words (with the most frequent at the top).

Task(s)

You will find the tasks on the worksheets attached (cf. appendix). There is a template for the students as well as a teacher’s version with solutions. As mentioned before, the teacher knows their group of learners best and should adjust the scaffolding accordingly.

Follow-up activities

As this lesson focusses on grammatical difficulties in a stand-alone manner, it can be embedded into several units. The decision when to implement it must be made by the teacher. If the students have major problems with the use of this corpus analysis tool, it might be wise to divide the lesson up. The additional task is meant for students who have finished early, or could alternatively be used as homework. To enable the students to work with corpora in a more comprehensive way, the teacher should introduce them to further analysis functions from the website when the time is right, e.g., finding the correct preposition for certain words. Especially grammar and vocabulary work – which are so closely interlinked that they can hardly be addressed in isolation – can benefit from working with corpora and should therefore be regularly implemented in English classes. 

4 Options and further ideas

Many words in the English language have similar meanings but are used in different contexts and/or have different grammatical structures. Native speakers intuitively learn in which contexts to use these words idiomatically. This unit was designed to teach the verbs tell and say but can also serve as a model for other words that have similar meaning, e.g., cause and bring about, beautiful and attractive, safety and security.

Another idea would be using more than one corpus to compare the use of words in different language varieties, e.g., British English (e.g., using the BNC) and American English (e.g., using the COCA). Comparisons between an inner-circle variety (e.g., British English) and an outer- or expanding circle variety (e.g., Indian or Nigerian English) are also possible. There just needs to be an appropriate corpus to use (e.g., the Global Web-Based English Corpus).

The corpus analysis tool that has been introduced in this chapter offers other search functions alongside List and Collocates, e.g., Chart and Compare. Just to give an example, the Compare function can be used to directly compare the search results of two words (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11: The Compare function

The results are then presented in two juxtaposed tables that allow for a relatively easy comparison of their collocational patterns. The numerical scale underneath the text fields can be used to narrow the results down to the number of words that precede or follow the words. However, this function is not included in this worksheet because the simple comparison of the verbs tell and say generates the following results (Fig. 12):

Fig 12: Compare function results for ‘say’ and ‘tell’

Abstracting results from this chart did not seem age-appropriate to us and would probably leave students confused. Should the structure of this worksheet be copied and adapted for older students (presumably grade 8 and higher), including the Compare function could be considered as a way of exposing the students to additional input that they may benefit from.

5 Conclusion

This lesson introduces students to the work with corpora at an early stage. Acquiring digital skills is of importance in these times of rapid technical developments. Consequently, it may be beneficial to introduce students to a variety of digital tools. The more they have the opportunity to interact with corpus platforms, the easier the handling gets. This lesson could therefore be useful to introduce students to basic corpus analyses. It provides a lot of instructions and scaffolding which supports those in need, especially when using this type of tool for the very first time.

Language is not a fixed concept; therefore, it is relevant to use tools that allow the student to dive into real language situations aside from the textbook used in school. Our lesson focusses on a typical learner error, namely the collocational patterns of the verbs tell and say. German-speaking students cannot be expected to understand why they cannot use the words synonymously without further explanations. Implementing this lesson to clarify the distinction at an early stage can avoid long-term fossilisation of unidiomatic structures.

By following the step-by-step instructions included in this chapter, teachers should be able to create corpus-based lessons on any other typical error that their students regularly make.

6 Resources and references

Davies, Mark. 2020. English Corpora. https://www.english-corpora.org/ (25 March, 2021).

English Corpora: Most widely used online corpora. Billions of words of data: free online access. n.d. https://www.english-corpora.org/overview.asp (12 August, 2020).

Naser Eddine, A. 2011. Second language acquisition: The articulation of vowels and the importance of tools in the learning process. In J. Arabski & A. Wojtaszek (eds.), The acquisition of L2 phonology, 3-15. Multilingual Matters: Bristol.

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2015. Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium, Schuljahrgänge 5-10. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?skey_lev0_0=Schulbereich&svalue_lev0_0=Sek+I&skey_lev0_1=Fach&svalue_lev0_1=Englisch&skey_lev0_2=Dokumentenart&svalue_lev0_2=Kerncurriculum&docid=1197&p=detail_view (26 March, 2021).

Turton, N. D., & J. B. Heaton. 1997. Longman dictionary of common errors (3. impr). Harlow: Longman.

7 Appendix

7.1 Worksheet “Tell or Say” (four pages) – Student version

7.2 Worksheet “Tell or Say” (four pages) – Teachers’ version

1 Introduction

“In SLA [Second Language Acquisition] literature, there is general agreement that all language acquisition starts with input” (Perez et al 2014: 173). In other words, students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) need to be confronted with language (input) in order to be able to produce language (output). Writing tasks target students’ productive skills. However, it is simply impossible to expect students to use vocabulary which they have never been exposed to before. Therefore, they need to be given opportunities to encounter such suitable vocabulary beforehand. This chapter thus aims to show how English corpora can be used to provide such input.

The English curriculum for secondary schools in Lower Saxony explicitly lists “creative writing” as a competence (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 20). By the end of 8^th grade (end of middle school), students are expected to be able to produce simple essays. By the end of 10^th grade, this competence is to be improved: students are expected to write more complex and extensive texts. Based on these curricular guidelines, the exercises in this chapter focus on students’ creative writing skills.

2 Tools and methods

This chapter relies on Sketch Engine as an online corpus analysis tool. This tool already contains more than 500 ready-to-use corpora in different languages and also makes it easy for users to optionally compile their own corpora. It is accessed via its website, therefore no additional program or application must be downloaded; a working internet connection suffices. Although Sketch Engine is not free to use, a number of reasons justify the choice of this tool for the present chapter. First of all, it provides powerful inbuilt corpus analysis functions which can be used to analyze collocations, word lists, concordances, and much more. Sketch Engine comes with a free 30-days-trial and is also free until March 2022 for researchers, lecturers and students of EU academic institutions taking part in the ELEXIS project.

The corpus used in this chapter is the English Web 2015 (abbreviated to enTenTen15), which consists of ca. 15.7 billion words of written language from the internet. The English Web 2015 corpus was chosen because it is one of the largest corpora available and, since it is a compilation of online texts, is well suited for the exercise of writing a travel blog post.

The lesson plan in 4.2. presents the important functions of the Sketch Engine interface to students. During the second half of the lesson, students can then make use of their new knowledge and consult a corpus in order to find suitable vocabulary for a short essay. The lesson plan may be embedded in an introductory lesson on corpus methods or immediately afterwards. However, it is not advised to start using Sketch Engine without any introduction, as this will likely overwhelm students.

3 Step-by-step guide

Note that, for the lesson presented, each student or pair of students must have a laptop or computer with a working internet connection, as well as a Sketch Engine account.

1. Introduction: The teacher’s laptop is connected to the video projector to project a short text on the board:
   Last weekend I went to the beach. The beach was beautiful and the sea was also beautiful. The beach was very bright and reflected the sunlight. Along the beach there were many beautiful cafes and restaurant. I walked on the beach for many hours, just up and down. The beach was not too far from my hotel, so I stayed until it got dark. What a beautiful day.
2. The teacher asks the students what they think of the text and how it can be made more fun to read and more varied in terms of vocabulary. At this point, the discussion should lead towards the importance of adequate adjectives for more vivid descriptions and the use of synonyms to avoid repetition.
3. Students turn on their devices, connect to www.sketchengine.eu and log in. The teacher also follows these steps. As the teacher’s laptop is still connected to the video projector, the students can compare their screens in order to check whether they have followed the steps correctly.
4. In the search bar at the top of the page, the students are instructed to load the “English Web 2015” corpus (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Lesson plan: Step 4.

5. Students are instructed to click on “Word Sketch”, a function that lists a word’s most typical collocates, organised according to their grammatical relation to the search word (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Lesson plan: Step 5.

6. Students are asked to type in beach and click on “GO” (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Lesson plan: Step 6.

7. The teacher gives a brief presentation of the different kinds of grammatical relations and their value for creative writing. In this case, the category “modifiers of ‘beach’” is the most important, as it lists all the words which are frequently used to modify “beach” in the corpus, and these are mostly adjectives. In this example, the collocation beautiful beach is very frequent, but alternatives could be stunning beach or pristine beach (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4: Lesson plan: Step 7.

8. Students are then encouraged to use this method to find suitable adjectives to avoid the overuse of beautiful in the introductory text. Weaker students may need to be told that the words they will need to look up using the “Word Sketch” function to achieve this, e.g. sea, cafés, restaurants, and day. Thus, for example, for sea, students may choose to replace beautiful in the original text with calm, deep, blue, crystal clear, etc.
9. In the next step, students are introduced to the “Thesaurus” function, which generates a list of the search word’s synonyms and related words. To use this function, they must click on “Thesaurus” in the menu (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5: Lesson plan: Step 9.

10. As an example, students are asked to search for beautiful (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6: Lesson plan: Step 10.

11. The teacher explains that the resulting list of synonyms was automatically compiled and may therefore contain anomalies. However, this list can nevertheless be very useful in helping students diversify their vocabulary in their own creative writing. By clicking on the three dots to the right of any word, students can see the word used in context and hence check that it is appropriate for their own text (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7. Lesson plan: Step 11.

12. The teacher then provides and explains the following tasks:

A) What modifiers are frequently used in the corpus to describe a village? Use Sketch Engine’s “Word Sketch” function to find these modifiers and write a short fictional paragraph about your visit to a village (ca. 5-7 sentences). Try to make your text as varied as possible.
B) Try using Sketch Engine’s “Thesaurus” function to find suitable synonyms for some of these modifiers.

13. In the end, students can present their results and also the difficulties they encountered. Other students try to find alternative solutions.

4 Options and further ideas

As mentioned above, the guides and exercises presented in this chapter serve solely as examples and can easily be adapted to other learning objectives and topics. For example, students could use corpora as an aid for writing manuals, e-mails, short stories, and so on. With Sketch Engine, it is also possible to focus more specifically on certain word classes, e.g. prepositions or adverbs.

5 Conclusion

This chapter aimed to illustrate how students can improve their creative writing skills by consulting a corpus analysis tool. Students can use Sketch Engine to extend and diversify their own vocabulary. Furthermore, Sketch Engine has the potential to be used for other exercises designed to improve the students’ writing skills.

However, it has to be taken into consideration that Sketch Engine is not free to use beyond the 30-day trial period. Alternatively, teachers may want to consult SKELL (skell.sketchengine.co.uk), which is a free, highly simplified, version of Sketch Engine designed specifically for language learning. Whilst it is based on a smaller corpus, incidentally also of web-based language, it nevertheless also includes the functions “Word Sketch” and “Similar words” (which is similar to the “Thesaurus” function), which can be used for exactly the same types of activities described in this chapter. As with all new tools, it is recommended that teachers test the interface beforehand to check that the results provided by SKELL are likely to meet the needs of the students.

6 Resources and references

Kilgarriff, Adam, Pavel Rychlý, Pavel Smrž & David Tugwell. 2004. The Sketch Engine: Information technology. https://www.sketchengine.eu/wp-content/uploads/The_Sketch_Engine_2004.pdf (13 October, 2020).

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2015. Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium, Schulgänge 5-10: Englisch. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?p=download&upload=139 (13 October, 2020).

Perez, Maribel Montero, Hans Paulussen, Lieve Macken & Piet Desmet. 2014. From input to output: The potential of parallel corpora for CALL. Lang Resources & Evaluation 48(1). 165-189. DOI: 10.1007/s10579-013-9241-4.

1 Introduction and rationale

According to Anne Wichmann et al. (1997), the main rationale for using corpora in teaching is their immediate availability for students’ use. To do so, students need to acquire the essential know-how to be able to explore corpora as part of their self-regulated learning (cf. Wichmann et al. 1997: 7). Likewise, the curriculum for secondary schools in Lower Saxony requires students to acquire essential learning strategies and study techniques that enable them to solve problems effectively on their own using a range of resources (cf. Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 27). Accordingly, this chapter focuses on how teachers can introduce data-driven learning (DDL) to their students so that they can autonomously use corpora to improve their writing after having a writing assignment marked by the teacher and returned to them. Additionally, it gives further ideas on how to use the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) for writing in general, since it allows learners to quickly and easily see how native speakers use language in a wide variety of texts.

If you are familiar with using the COCA, there is hardly any teacher preparation needed for this lesson. Otherwise, please make sure that you work through the introductory steps below beforehand, in order to be able to explain the tools to your students and answer students’ questions in class.

2 Corpus, tools and methods

The resource used for this lesson is the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), which contains more than one billion words and is equally divided up into spoken English, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers and academic texts. With the latest update in March 2020, TV and movie subtitles, blogs, and other webpages have been added to the corpus as well (cf. Davies 2020b: 1). According to english-corpora.org, the COCA is the most widely used corpus of general English. Since the latest texts are dated from 2019, it is also the most up to date (cf. ibid). Once you have learnt about its basic functions, the web interface is very easy to handle. It is free for all to use. It follows from all these considerations that the COCA is a good choice of resource for such a lesson.

3 Step-by-step guide

Lesson plan

The lesson plan (Table 1) gives an overview of how the lesson may be structured.

Instructions

The following instructions cover explanations about general functions of the web interface while working through an example that focuses on the different usages of two commonly confused words, namely fewer and less. They both have the same meaning. However, when do you use less and when should you use fewer? Perhaps, this confusion is a mistake which quite a few students made in the writing assignment that you recently corrected and aim to hand back in the designed lesson.

Steps:

1. Go to www.english-corpora.org.
2. Click on “Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)” to open the corpus (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Selecting a corpus.

3. You should now be able to see the following display (Fig. 2):

Fig. 2: Conducting a search in the COCA.

4. Click on “Sections” (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Conducting a search in the COCA.

5. Choose the register(s) you want to focus on. If you want to find out how less and fewer are used in typical written text types, select “Fiction”, “Magazine”, “Newspaper” and “Academic”, for instance (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4: Limiting the search to specific registers.

6. Make sure you have selected the “List”-option. Then, type in fewer and press “Find matching strings”.
7. Click on the word to see in which contexts it has been used (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5: Result page from the corpus query.

8. In the concordance lines you can now look for regularities in the usage of the word fewer (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6: Concordances of fewer.

9. Now repeat the steps but search for the word less. Compare its usage to that of fewer and try to formulate “rules” for the use of these words on the basis of their respective concordance lines.

Solution: ‘Less’ is used with uncountable nouns and with adjectives or adverbs, while ‘fewer’ is used with countable nouns.

10. Additionally, you can ask students to pay special attention to register differences. For this, you might want to go back to step 5 and include more registers to allow a better comparison. Especially the inclusion of spoken and spoken-like text types (e.g. TV scripts or web language) could be interesting as this allows students to explore potential differences between conversational spoken and formal written English: are there any instances of less/fewer that deviate from the usage “rules” above? If yes, which nouns are most often affected by this? In which contexts and text types is this most common? See “Options and further ideas” below for a detailed explanation of how to compare the distribution of a particular construction in different registers using the “Chart”-function of the web interface.

Tasks

Pre-task

If your students are not yet familiar with using the concordance function of english-corpora.org, it is advisable to explain the procedure while working through the fewer/less example in plenum. Alternatively, you can choose any warm-up activity suitable for a lesson that asks students to remedy errors in their writing assignments.

Main task

In the main task of the lesson, ask your students to fill in the worksheet (see appendix) by querying the COCA. The worksheet consists of the following instructions:

1. Write down three language issues that came up in your writing assignment.
2. For each issue, find a sentence in the corpus which uses the word/phrase/construction in a suitable way and write it down.
3. Describe how each word/phrase is used.
4. Use the information that you gathered from the corpus to rewrite your sentences.

Review questions

After having completed the main task, ask your students to answer the following review questions (cf. Friginal 2018: 229):

• Was using the concordance function helpful for learning more about word/phrase/grammar usage in English?
• In your opinion, is it worth spending the time learning how to use the concordance function?
• Are you likely to use the concordance function on your own in the future? Why/why not?

4 Options and further ideas

Variations

• Your students can also use their mobile phones instead of computers.
• As all of the research interfaces on english-corpora.org are similar, your students can apply their knowledge to explore other corpora, such as the British National Corpus (BNC), for instance.

Additional ideas

This section suggests further ideas on how your students can use corpus data to further improve their writing skills. If your students enjoy working with the COCA, it is highly recommendable for you to work through the following functions and present them one by one to your class. Should some of your students finish the tasks of the designed lesson earlier than expected, you may also use these ideas as gap fillers.

Exploring collocations

The term ‘collocation’ is used to describe words that tend to appear together. This is the case with to make mistakes, for instance. Thus, mistake is most frequently associated with, or collocates with, the verb make. By contrast, to do mistakes is considered unidiomatic because mistake does not collocate with the verb do. Exploring typical collocations involving different word classes, such as adjective + noun, or verb + noun, is another way of using the COCA in writing classes. Using the collocation function, you can see which words frequently co-occur with other words, which provides great insights into collocation usage and meaning. Here is an overview of how to use this function:

1. Open the COCA on www.english-corpora.org/coca, click on the ‘+’-icon and choose “Collocates” (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7: Using the “Collocates” function.

2. You should now be able to view the following display (Fig.8):

Fig. 8: Using the “Collocates” function.

Imagine the following scenario: you want to write a text about finances and are unsure about verbs that are commonly used with the noun money. Figure 9 shows an exemplary search for typical verbs one or two positions before the noun money in newspaper writing. Make sure to set the search options to “Group by lemmas” (not words) so that inflected forms such as making, made or makes will be classified as belonging to the same verb, in this case make.

Fig. 9: Searching for typical verb collocates of the word money.

Thus, you can conclude that in newspaper writing, the five most frequently used verbs in front of money are make, raise, spend, save and get.

Searching for synonyms

Searching for synonyms is another possible way of using the COCA to increase the variety of word choice when writing texts. Open the COCA on www.english-corpora.org and choose “List”. Type in an equal symbol (=), followed by any search string of interest. Figure 10 shows an exemplary search for synonyms of the adjective beautiful:

Fig. 10: Synonyms of beautiful.

Exploring different registers

Searching in the COCA provides students with information about the frequency of words or phrases in different styles of English such as spoken, fiction or academic, for instance. Imagine the following situation: you need to write an assignment and you would like to know if it is appropriate to use the expression freak out in formal contexts. To answer this question, you have to follow three easy steps:

1. Open the COCA on english-corpora.org and choose the “Chart”-option, which shows the frequency of a search string in each section (Fig.11):

Fig. 11: Using the “Chart” function.

2. Type freak out in the search field and press “See frequency by section”. You should get the following results (Fig. 12):

Fig. 12: The frequency of freak out in different registers.

3. Finally, you need to interpret the chart: Fig. 12 shows that the expression freak out in academic texts is only used 0.08 times per million words, which is the lowest value of all displayed sections. Thus, it is advisable to use a different expression in the assignment, such as the synonymously used term to lose control, for instance (see above: “Searching for Synonyms”).

The latest option of the COCA

In March 2020, the COCA was expanded in scope, size and features to make it even more useful for researchers, teachers, and learners, who can now browse through a list of the most frequent 60,000 words in the corpus, and see a wide range of useful information on each of these words (cf. Davies 2020b: 1). To make use of this, you can either click on “Word” and search for a specific word or click on “Browse” (see Fig. 13) to search by word form (e.g. *ism), rank order (e.g. words among the 6,000^th, 26,000^th or 46,000^th most frequent words), pronunciation (e.g. words rhyming with light, or three-syllable words accented on the last syllable), or any combination of these (cf. Davies 2020b: 11).

Fig. 13: Using the “Browse” function.

To explore this new feature, click on “Browse” and “Find random words” (Fig. 14).

Fig. 14: Using the “Browse” function.

Fig. 15: Using the “Browse” function.

For each word on the list, you can hear the word pronounced, watch videos with the word in the text, see related images from Google Images, and get a translation for your preferred target language (Fig. 15). When you see a word of interest, click on it. You will be redirected to its homepage, which contains frequency information, definitions, translations, links to audio, images, and videos, as well as synonyms, topics (words that co-occur anywhere in the ca. 500,000 texts), collocates, clusters, and concordance lines (Fig. 18) (cf. Davies 2020b: 6). On the top right corner of each word’s homepage, you will find direct links to the respective pages of some of these features (cf. Davies 2020b: 8). For a more detailed account of the word’s collocates, clusters, concordance lines (KWIC) etc., simply click on the feature in question (Fig. 16). Figure 17 shows the collocation page of the word trail.

Fig. 16: Navigation tabs at the top of the word’s homepage.

Fig. 17: Collocates of trail.

Fig. 18: Homepage of the word trail (Davies 2020b: 7).

It is hoped that this short introduction into the new “Browse”-option of the COCA gives valuable insights into its great potential for classroom use. Looking at the summary statistics page for each word, you can see a great wealth of information at once (collocates, clusters, synonyms, concordance lines and the distribution across genres), which saves a lot of time and effort and thus makes this new function very convenient. However, note that words that are not among the 60,000 most frequent words in the corpus do not have such a summary statistics page. Thus, you may well need to know about the original, basic functions of the interface to carry out your search. Starting with the basic functions gives students a better understanding of how corpora work and also gives them the necessary tools to search in all the other corpora featured on English-corpora.org because the COCA is currently the only corpus on the web interface that supports this new function.

5 Caveats and limitations

After approximately 10-15 queries the website will ask you to register. Registration, however, is free to everyone and takes one or two minutes only. Afterwards you can carry on using the website as normal.

Fig. 19: Registering on the website.

Click on the yellow icon in the top right corner of the website (Fig. 19) to register. You should then see the following display (Fig. 20, Fig. 21):

Fig. 20: Registering on the website.

Fig. 21: Registering on the website.

You will be asked to select your user status. Note that you must provide a web address that verifies your status in order to set up a Researcher or Semi-Researcher account. However, bear in mind that even if you are not approved as Researcher or Semi-Researcher, you can still use the corpora – just at a lower level of access (cf. Davies 2020a), which, however, is entirely sufficient for the purpose of this chapter. Within one or two minutes after having submitted your information, you will receive an email. Click on the link in that email and you will be able to continue using the web interface.

Occasionally, the following message (Fig. 22) will pop up, asking you to consider upgrading to a premium account. However, there is no need to upgrade your account. Please be patient and wait for a few seconds, after which you will be able to continue with your search.

Fig. 22: Upgrade notification.

6 Conclusion

The main advantage of this lesson is that students are given the means to correct their mistakes independently with the aid of the COCA. Thus, students acquire learning strategies that enable them to solve problems in writing effectively by themselves, which meets one of the requirements of the curriculum. In addition, a recent meta-analysis of data-driven language learning interventions revealed that students are more likely to remember the language patterns they infer from their own corpus queries (cf. Boulton & Cobb 2017). Furthermore, the use of digital media in the classroom can contribute to higher motivation and engagement on the part of the students. On the teachers’ side, there is not much preparation required for lesson, which is also beneficial. Moreover, the additional ideas mentioned above present many more interesting features of the web interface, which provides inspiration for many more COCA-based lessons.

7 Resources and references

Boerger, Claudia. 2020. Examples warm-ups. http://www.jochenenglish.de/misc/warm_up_beispiele.pdf (23 March, 2020).

Boulton, Alex & Tom Cobb. 2017. Corpus use in language learning: A meta-analysis. Language Learning 67(2). 348-393. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12224.

Davies, Mark. 2020a. English Corpora. https://www.english-corpora.org/

Davies, Mark. 2020b. The COCA corpus. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/help/coca2020_overview.pdf.

Davies, Mark. 2008-2019. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 600 million words, 1990-present. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/

Friginal, Eric. 2018. Corpus linguistics for English teachers: New tools, online resources, and classroom activities. New York; London: Routledge.

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2015. Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium, Schuljahrgänge 5-10: Englisch. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?p=download&upload=139 (12 October, 2020).

Wichmann, Anne, Steven Fligelstone, Tony MacEnery & Gerry Knowles (eds.). 1997. Teaching and language corpora. London: Pearson Education.

8 Appendix

1 Introduction and rationale

In a fast and globalised world, English serves as the lingua franca of the 21^st century, especially on the internet. Bilingual teaching of other subjects besides English itself is finding increasing popularity among German secondary schools, as it offers great potential for successful second language acquisition.

Geography presents a perfect opportunity to combine regular class topics with students’ increasing language proficiency. Due to the internationality of its content, intercultural learning can be particularly encouraged when geography is taught in English. Moreover, the vivid nature of geography teaching, which frequently involves lots of maps, illustrations and caricatures, provides suitable support for second language learners because geography is often not perceived to be as abstract as many other school subjects (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 28). The contemporary relevance of geographic topics presents promising opportunities for bilingual teaching. The English curriculum of Lower Saxony (Germany) further specifies that appropriate subject-specific terminology ought to be acquired in both the first and second language of learners (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 28).

A central aspect of geography teaching in the classroom is the analysis of graphics and illustrations. Especially graphs and diagrams are found in almost all geography topics. Thus, the ability to describe such figures is a crucial competence in order to succeed in geography. However, in a foreign language context, this ability can be quite difficult to achieve. Students may be able to produce precise descriptions in their mother tongue but struggle to transfer this ability to English because specific vocabulary is missing. In light of this difficulty, a corpus analysis can help retrieve the language necessary to describe graphs and diagrams in an idiomatic manner.

A corpus analysis of geography-specific language offers a wide variety of options for students to improve their own language skills. Following a data-driven learning approach, students are enabled to research collocations and frequent patterns of native and expert language usage themselves. Furthermore, these methods of corpus analysis are easily deployable within other language learning processes to increase language proficiency in other areas of English communication. Corpus analysis enables students to gain insights into native/expert language usage through independent, self-regulated learning.

The student activity in relation to diagrams is split into two 90-minute lessons. First, the diagrams are created from the necessary information in worksheet 1 (see page 10). Second, the actual connection to a corpus-based analysis is drawn: students analyse concordances in the English Web 2015 (enTenTen15) corpus on Sketch Engine. This lesson takes a learner-corpus interaction approach towards gaining deeper insight into language usage by utilizing corpora for specific contexts.

2 Corpus, tools and methods

The planned lesson is based on the online corpus tool Sketch Engine. Sketch Engine provides a variety of different corpora and functions for corpus analysis, making it a suitable option for language learners to engage with. The students in this particular class are already familiar with the online tool. The following step-by-step-instructions may provide further support. For the first part of the corpus-based lesson, students work with the English Web 2015 (enTenTen15) corpus and use the Concordance and Thesaurus functions to search for synonyms. In the second part of the lesson, students use the Word Sketch function to find topic-related collocations, which they can use to describe the demographic transition model. Therefore, students will work with three different functions of Sketch Engine, which will help them to increase their language proficiency in the bilingual geography classroom. Utilizing the different functions and corpora will show students that one needs to select the right function to obtain meaningful results.

3 Step-by-step guide for Teachers

3.1 Lesson Plan

Preparatory lesson

Main lesson

3.2 Instructions

In the preparatory lesson, students learn about the characteristics of the different stages of the demographic transition model, following the information provided on Worksheet 1 to draw a graph. This provides the basis for the following lesson with regard to content. As a preparation for the main corpus-based lesson, students get homework in which they have to underline all the words in the texts on Worksheet 1 that describe the demographic transition model. The idea of the corpus-based lesson is essentially to help students identify different words and collocations to describe a graph by using a corpus.

3.3 Main Lesson

3.3.1 Warm-up

The lesson begins with an oral description of the demographic transition model from the previous lesson in a plenary discussion. We expect students to use the word show most frequently, e.g., the graph shows... The teacher will point this out and then students are encouraged to think of verbs other than show that can be used in this context. Meanwhile, the teacher notes down the students’ ideas on the board.

3.3.2 Main Lesson Task 1

The following tasks require access to web-enabled computers or tablets in the classroom. Students work in pairs and share a device. They follow the instructions on Worksheet 2 and work independently with Sketch Engine. Students will have previously received a general introduction to Sketch Engine and created a personal account. However, the worksheet still provides detailed instructions and extra tips.

In the first task, students use the Concordance function in Sketch Engine to search for concordance lines that include the phrase: graph shows. By looking at the type of diagram that is described and identifying its source of origin, students familiarize themselves with working with a corpus. Seeing the structure of the concordance lines will help them to understand that a corpus is composed of various texts from different sources.

Next, students search for synonyms of the verb show in the English Web 2015 (enTenTen15) corpus by using the Thesaurus function. They note down their findings and draw assumptions about which verbs may be used in the context of graph descriptions.

To verify or disprove students’ assumptions, the next step includes the use of another function of Sketch Engine. This time students do not use the Thesaurus function but rather the Word Sketch function to look for collocations by searching for verbs that are used with graph as a subject. Then students write down their results and compare them to their findings from the Thesaurus search. Additionally, they may reflect on the differences between a Thesaurus and a Word Sketch search and decide which method is more effective for their purpose of finding alternative verbs to show to describe a graph.

3.3.3 Main Lesson Task 2

The final task of this corpus-based lesson attempts to encourage students to apply their knowledge of working with a corpus to write in-depth descriptions of graphs and their trends and peculiarities. For homework, students were asked to underline all the words that describe the graph on worksheet 1. Apart from show, the verbs increase and fall are also used to describe the developments of the stages of the demographic transition model on the worksheet. Students are asked to use Sketch Engine to search for synonyms of these verbs and to find additional words and collocations that describe the graph. Finally, students write a complete description of the demographic transition model.

3.4 Tasks

4 Options and further ideas

In order to achieve a suitable level of difficulty for all students, a certain degree of internal differentiation is necessary. While some students might find it comparatively easy to work with Sketch Engine individually, others might struggle and need more guidance. Thus, it is possible to make tasks easier or more challenging by leaving out or adding intermediate steps in the task description. The latter could be achieved through the addition of screenshots of the actual web pages.

Another possibility is the introduction to further materials for quicker students. These students could analyse an additional graph on population growth and change. Students could describe a graph showing the development of a population in a country of their choice after researching it in their textbook, atlas, or online. Figure 1 depicts an example of the German demographic transition model.

Fig. 1: Demographic transition model of Germany (own illustration based on data from Statistisches Bundesamt 2020)

Once the initial tasks are completed, students who have finished could do a similar corpus analysis to acquire further language knowledge to describe maps or caricatures. To enable them to elaborate on this, an exemplary map or caricature is needed. The teacher could provide these in advance and students could describe either one of them with the help of corpus searches.

5 Caveats and Limitations

Difficulties might occur when working with the commercial platform Sketch Engine if the teacher and the students do not have personal accounts. Even though Sketch Engine has an open version (app.sketchengine.eu/#open) as well, it is not sufficient for the requirements described in this chapter since it only allows access to a very limited selection of corpora. One option would be to make use of a free 30-day trial during which all of Sketch Engine’s functions are accessible. However, this is only a short-term solution and might serve the purpose of this lesson but will restrict further corpus-learner interaction in the classroom. Alternatively, teachers may want to consider using the SKELL interface (skell.sketchengine.eu), which is much more limited in terms of functions, but is entirely free and was specifically designed with language learners in mind.

6 Conclusion

Bilingual teaching aims to encourage the most authentic use of a foreign language in a specific subject. We hope that this chapter has shown that working with corpora can be a great opportunity for students to expand their vocabulary and increase their language proficiency. Even though the corpus-based lesson itself requires more time than if the teacher simply handed out a list of vocabulary, we believe that corpus-based, data-driven learning is a great addition to the bilingual geography classroom. Searching words and collocations within a corpus challenges students. The lesson presented in this chapter thus requires students’ cognitive engagement throughout the tasks. Besides, the use of digital media is encouraging for students and is likely to be a welcome change to the usual style of teaching that students experience on a daily basis. Students not only learn new words but also how phrases and collocations are used in a context that is based on real, authentic texts. Furthermore, learner-corpus interaction in the classroom equips students with a tool that provides opportunities for use in the future that they can benefit from to improve their language skills in the long term.

7 Resources and references

Campbell, Maxi-Ann. 2018. Using COCA to answer the question on everyone’s lips. In Eric Friginal (ed.), Corpus linguistics for English teachers: New tools, online resources, and classroom activities, 299-305. New York, NY: Routledge.

Friginal, Eric. 2018. Corpus linguistics for English teachers: New tools, online resources, and classroom activities. New York, NY: Routledge.

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2014. Bilingualer Unterricht – Materialien für kompetenzorientierten Unterricht im Sekundarbereich I. http://arbeitsplattform.bildung.hessen.de/fach/bilingual/lehrer/ausb/mat/nibis-materialien_bili_2014.pdf (06 February, 2021).

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2015. Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium, Schuljahrgänge 5-10: Erdkunde. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?skey_lev0_0=Schulbereich&svalue_lev0_0=Sek+I&skey_lev0_1=Fach&svalue_lev0_1=Erdkunde&docid=1112&p=detail_view (13 August, 2020).

Statistisches Bundesamt. 2020. Anzahl der Geburten und der Sterbefälle in Deutschland in den Jahren von 1950 bis 2019. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/161831/umfrage/gegenueberstellung-von-geburten-und-todesfaellen-in-deutschland/ (15 February, 2021).

1 Introduction and rationale

Not only do English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners need to develop communicative competence, they should also learn how to expand their knowledge independently. The English curriculum for higher level secondary schools in Lower-Saxony, Germany, states that students should add topic-specific vocabulary to their basic knowledge (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2017: 18). Further, students should develop language learning awareness, hence the ability to learn and access new vocabulary using different methods and materials (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2017: 23). Even younger students at lower secondary schools are expected to learn to work with dictionaries and similar resources and then organise new words to expand existing language structures and patterns (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 27). There is a huge variety of resources to look up new words and expressions, but especially non-native speakers may end up using vocabulary in inappropriate contexts. Such problems can be avoided by using authentic language data, which can be found in representative language corpora. Practicing using different resources is often neglected at school or considered “boring” and students frequently only learn vocabulary from their textbook or rely on bilingual dictionaries. By providing learners with rich input and allowing them to discover specific terms and phrases about topics that directly affect and influence them, a teacher can improve individual learning outcomes.

Recently, young people have become more interested and politically active, particularly with regard to the issue of climate change. After Swedish activist Greta Thunberg started protesting in August 2018, millions of students around the world joined her to raise awareness of the climate crisis and set off an avalanche of grassroot organisations demanding political action (Gill 2019). Students should be supported and given the abilities to communicate their opinions and ideas on this topic and the ability to consult corpora can support them in this endeavour by providing them with real-life, relevant language input. The corpus-based lesson presented in this chapter aims at connecting methodological skills and vocabulary training with an affectively and cognitively engaging topic. Teachers can easily adjust the lesson plan to any topic of choice that they consider to be suitable and appealing to their students.

The proposed lesson targets learners at higher secondary school aged 14-15 or older (9th grade). As the students will work online with a corpus, it is assumed that they can use a computer and that they have access to the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) via english-corpora.org. It is best for you to acquire an academic premium license to be able to work with texts longer than 400 words. However, this is not obligatory for this lesson, either. Each student will need to create a free account before the lesson. A handout will guide them through the tasks including step-by-step instructions for the website (cf. Appendix). However, students still have the freedom to search for vocabulary and collocations they consider relevant. Finally, each student will create their own collection of new words and collocations for future use.

2 Corpus, tools and methods

In this lesson, students will work with the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which currently contains texts from 1990 to 2019 and is regularly updated. The COCA can be accessed via english-corpora.org.

3 Step-by-step guide

In this chapter, step-by-step instructions are provided for both the teacher and the students. The teacher will have to provide the students with an appropriate source, e.g., an online article, and adjust the worksheet and handout for the students to match the chosen topic. With the help of a handout with step-by-step instructions, students will work with the corpus themselves.

3.1 Teacher preparation

First of all, as a teacher, skim the lesson plan (Table 7) to have an overview of the planned lesson. Be aware that this lesson should be preceded by an introductory lesson on climate change. For this chapter’s lesson, choose an appropriate text or article for the learners that serves as a starting point. This text then needs to be shared with the students either digitally or as a print version. To prepare the text, follow the instructions below:

3.1.1 Text preparation

1. Choose a text on the topic you want your students to focus on and derive new vocabulary from. We recommend using Ecosia (https://www.ecosia.org/) for this, the search engine that plants trees. We chose the article “What is climate change? A really simple guide” (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24021772 (BBC News 2020).

2. Instead of – or in addition to – providing your students with a digital/print version of the article, you could also make use of the text analysis function of the COCA, which lets you find out more about the words and phrases in your text (e.g., frequencies, collocational behaviour, etc.). If you wish to do so, you need to upload your text onto the website. First, remove any possibly distracting content. To do so, go to “jusText demo” (Pomikalek 2021, URL: https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projects/justext/), copy and paste the link that belongs to the article (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Paste URL of source text

3. Press ENTER on your keyboard and select “Hide boilerplate” on your screen (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Boilerplate removal with jusText

4. Your text will now appear without any photos, images or other annotations (Fig. 3) and you can provide it to your students by copying it into a new document.

Fig. 3: Cleaned text

5. Share the text digitally with your students (e.g., via e-mail, Google Docs or the open source tool Cryptpad). You can also hand out a printed version.

6. In order to prepare the beginning of the lesson, go to www.english-corpora.org/ and select the COCA from the list of available corpora (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4: List of corpora

If you want to work with a text longer than 400 words, make sure your account icon is not red but green (Fig. 5). Red would mean you are not logged in with your institution’s academic or premium account.

Fig. 5: Log-in icon on english-corpora.org

7. Choose the function “Analyze text” (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6: Icon for the function “Analyze text”

The following interface will appear (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7: “Analyze text” – interface

8. Copy the text you chose for this exercise. Check the beginning and end of the text and make sure that all unnecessary information like advertisements have been deleted. Then paste it into the blank field on the left and press “SEARCH” (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8: Using the “Analyze text” function

You should now see the following page (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9: “Analyze text” – output

9. Save the text to be able to access it immediately in class without having to copy and paste it again. To do so, press “SAVE TEXT” (Fig. 10). In class, you can reuse it by simply clicking on “MY TEXTS” and the green tick (Fig. 11).

Fig. 10: Saving the analysed text

Fig. 11: Accessing saved texts

10. You will then be taken back to the page shown in Fig. 9, which will serve as the starting point for the first task of the lesson (see section 3.2.2).

3.1.2 Worksheet creation

Besides choosing and sharing an appropriate text, the teacher has to prepare a worksheet and an accompanying handout for the learners. Therefore, decide which specific vocabulary you want to focus on in advance.

In the Appendix, you will find a template for a worksheet and handout that guides the students through the exercises. They are tailored to the specific text mentioned above. However, feel free to use any other text you prefer. These worksheets may be used as a template to design your own. Both can be adapted to your own text and topic of choice. You will find the suggested solutions to the worksheet in the Appendix as well.

3.2 Lesson plan

3.2.1 Overview

3.2.2 Tasks

Task 1

Go to the “Analyse text” function of the COCA and access your saved text by as explained in section 3.1.2 above (steps 9 and 10).

From this point onwards, share your screen with the class and explain the following to your students:

The words in the text are highlighted in different colours. Each colour stands for a specific frequency range. Blue words are very frequent in English, green words occur less frequently. Yellow words are relatively rare. The latter are often very topic-specific and are therefore likely to be unfamiliar to students. Now, let the students begin their tasks. Ask them to read the text individually and to highlight unfamiliar words (task 1a). Let the students decide on three words they want to learn more about. On your shared screen, take the students through the following steps for each word and explain what can be seen so that they can solve task 1b on their worksheets afterwards:

1. Make sure you are on the “WORD” interface (Fig. 12).

Fig. 12: The “WORD” interface

2. One by one, click on the three unfamiliar words in the text. A page with more information on the specific word will appear (see example in Fig. 13).

Fig. 13: Information page of the word climate

The main form of the word is highlighted and presented at the top of the page. It is followed by its word class in brackets. Below, the bar chart indicates the frequency distribution of the word across the eight text registers included in the COCA: blogs, websites, TV and movies, spoken language, fiction, magazines, news and academic publications. For example, the noun climate is least common in TV/movie language and fiction, and most common in blogs and academic language. The section “Topics” in the top-right corner shows words associated with climate and can help you find related words and concepts.

3. In order to fill in Table 1 on your worksheet, find the word’s definitions below the bar chart. Also, look at the section below that shows synonyms and marks the most appropriate ones, as well as the section “Collocates”, listed on the right.

4. To find out more about the word’s collocates, click on “more” right next to it (Fig. 13). You will then be taken to the following page (Fig. 14).

Fig. 14: “Collocates” page of the word climate

There, you will see four tables grouped by part of speech and frequency, one each for noun, adjective, verb and adverb collocates. Open the “Advanced Options” menu, enter the number 1 into the blank field and press GO (Fig. 15). Now, only collocates appearing to the immediate left or right of the noun climate will be displayed in the tables.

Fig. 15: “Advanced options” menu on the “Collocates” page

5. Pay attention to the grey blocks in the columns next to each collocate (Fig. 14). They indicate the most frequent position of the collocate relative to the search word climate, i.e., either before or after the word. The darker the colour, the more frequentliy does the search word’s collocate appear in this position. For example:

In some cases, the blocks to the left and right of the collocate are white, which means that these collocates can appear both before and after the noun climate.

6. To go back to the search word’s information page, either click on the little arrow in the top-left corner or on “ANALYZE TEXT” (Fig. 16).

Fig. 16: Going back to the information page

Task 2 and 3

After guiding the students through the first task, ask them to start their computers and to solve tasks 2 and 3 independently with the help of the handout (cf. Appendix).

4 Follow-up activities and further ideas

As shown in the worksheet and the lesson plan above, this lesson can be adapted to different levels of language proficiency and the amount of experience students have had with using digital media in the classroom. Task 3 could be given as homework or as an additional task for more advanced students, for example.

Further, this lesson can serve as a basis for different follow-up activities. Apart from finishing and expanding the word map on the worksheet, further activities may include:

• gathering new words relating to the “Fridays for Future” movement,
• preparing presentations about climate-related topics,
• working in groups and designing posters to inform others about climate-related issues or movements.

5 Conclusion

This lesson allows EFL learners to expand their vocabulary while working independently. With the help of a corpus, students develop a deeper understanding of topic-specific vocabulary. The worksheet aims to show students how to learn new vocabulary in chunks, which then enables them to use new words in appropriate contexts. Organising new vocabulary in a word map makes learning more sustainable, as visualisations can help learners memorise new words and collocations more easily.

Students are provided with a detailed handout that guides them through the individual steps of the lesson so that an introductory lesson on how to use a corpus is not needed.

Crucially, the methods used in this lesson can easily be applied to other topics. To do so, you would only need to change the basic text and adapt the worksheet and handout.

6 Resources and references

Resources:

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.

Pomikalek, Jan. (2021). JusText demo. https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projects/justext/.

References:

BBC News (18 November 2020). “What is climate change? A really simple guide”. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24021772. (25 March, 2021).

Conrad, Susan. 2016. Using corpus linguistics to improve the teaching of grammar. In Eli Hinkel (ed.), Teaching English grammar to speakers of other languages, 38-62. Florence: Taylor and Francis.

Friginal, Eric. 2018. Corpus linguistics for English teachers: new tools, online resources, and classroom activities. New York, NY: Routledge.

Gill, Mehr. (20 September, 2019). Explained: What is the Global Climate Strike movement? The Indian EXPRESS. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-what-is-the-global-climate-strike-movement-6013302/ (24 March, 2021).

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2015. Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium, Schuljahrgänge 5-10: Englisch. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?skey_lev0_0=Schulbereich&svalue_lev0_0=Sek+I&skey_lev0_1=Fach&svalue_lev0_1=Englisch&skey_lev0_2=Dokumentenart&svalue_lev0_2=Kerncurriculum&docid=1197&p=detail_view (25 March, 2021).

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2017. Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium – gymnasiale Oberstufe, die Gesamtschule – gymnasiale Oberstufe, das Berufliche Gymnasium, das Abendgymnasium, das Kolleg: Englisch. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?skey_lev0_0=Dokumentenart&svalue_lev0_0=Kerncurriculum&skey_lev0_1=Fach&svalue_lev0_1=Englisch&docid=1132&p=detail_view (25 March, 2021).

7 Appendix

Download the full worksheet and the handout by clicking on the images.

Fig. 17: Student worksheet

Fig. 18: Student handout

1 Introduction and rationale

Project-based teaching has become increasingly popular. The method is deemed to be potentially highly beneficial in terms of student engagement, independent and social learning, as well as offering many options for differentiation within mixed ability groups. However, conducting projects is often labour-intensive for teachers. Especially in English Language Teaching (ELT), project work often requires students to acquire subject-specific linguistic skills.

This chapter aims to present a flexible approach for providing students with the necessary linguistic support to conduct project work while also keeping the time needed for teacher preparation at a minimum. By teaching students how to use basic strategies of corpus linguistic research, this method will enable students to find the lexical information they need for the specific topic of their choice. This allows for more freedom and differentiation, and also guides the students to think of language as lexical patterns rather than as strings of individual words.

As an exemplary context in which the presented approach can be taken, this chapter outlines a project about sustainability, which is a highly topical issue in today’s world and, thus, very relevant to students’ lives. The main objective is to enable students to talk and write about topics of their own interests related to sustainability and to express personal opinions and emotions about them, which is in line with the secondary school curriculum of Lower Saxony, Germany (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 19, 23).

2 Corpus, tools and methods

The corpus used in this chapter is the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), freely accessible on www.english.corpora.org/COCA. It provides the option to look exclusively at the language of blogs (assuming that the language of blogs is comparable to the language of podcasts and videos), and includes a large number of recent texts, which is vital for a topic like sustainability that has rapidly gained public attention in the past few years. Moreover, the COCA works best for finding collocations on www.english-corpora.org, as it automatically groups words by part-of-speech, making its output more learner-friendly.

In the lessons, students will first use the “Texts/Virtual”-function to create a virtual corpus (their own subcorpus of the COCA) that only includes blogs about sustainability. They will then continue to explore this subcorpus by means of the “List”-, and “Collocates”-functions to find idiomatic language.

3 Step-by-step guide

3.1 Teacher Preparation

Creating a virtual corpus

Go to www.english-corpora.org. You should see a list of the corpora available on the website. Click on “Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)” (Fig. 1):

Fig. 1: List of corpora available on the web interface

Make sure that you are logged in, as you will create a virtual corpus on your account, i.e., it will only be visible to you (Fig. 2) (If you have not used the website before, you will need to register first by clicking on “My account” in the menu and then “Register” and filling out the required form. This is free and takes no longer than a minute).

Select “Texts/Virtual” in the blue box on the right, and click on “Create corpus “(Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Creating a virtual corpus

You should now see a search form (Fig. 3) that allows you to select certain texts from the COCA to include in your virtual corpus. For our purposes, we only want to include texts of the genre “Blog”. However, to exclude highly specialized texts with academic language, we will not select the subgenres “ACAD” and “LEGAL”. To do so, press “Ctrl” on your keyboard and click the individual subgenres of “BLOG” in the list, leaving out “ACAD” and “LEGAL” (Fig. 3).

To only include texts that are relevant to the topic of our project, type sustainability in the field next to “Words in text”. Then press “Submit” (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Searching for texts in the corpus

On the next page, you will find a list of all the texts your query has returned. Give your virtual corpus a name (e.g., sustainability) by typing it in the field next to “SAVE AS” and finally click “SUBMIT” (Fig. 4) to finish building your virtual corpus (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4: List of texts selected

Fig. 5: Your virtual corpus

Preparing the warm-up activity

The warm-up activity aims to show students the benefits of using corpora to obtain information about how words are naturally used together by asking what verb (maintain, preserve, retain, etc.) is most frequently associated with biodiversity. As preparation, search for the results in the full corpus:

Choose the COCA, click on the “+” next to “Browse” and then on “Collocates”.

Then type biodiversity into the “Word/phrase” search field, click on “POS” (part of speech) next to “Collocates”, choose “verb.ALL”, and select one position to the left (= verb that precedes biodiversity by one position within the sentence).

Next, click on “Options”, and let your search results be grouped by “LEMMAS” to make sure that conjugated verb forms do not result in duplicated findings (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6: Searching for verb collocates of biodiversity

In this case, do not choose the newly-created virtual corpus, as the whole content of the COCA will provide more results.

Submit your search (“Find collocates”) to obtain a list of the most frequent verbs co-occurring with biodiversity (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7: List of verb collocates of the search item biodiversity

Take a screenshot which you can present to your students during the warm-up of the second lesson.

For the first warm-up activity, select the first five findings, and click on “CONTEXT” just above the first verb of the list (Fig. 7).

Randomise your results afterwards (by clicking on a number next to “Find sample” in the top left corner of the result list) and take a screenshot to present in class.

Getting to know the “List”-function

Next, you should become familiar with the tasks that are used in the lesson and try out the “List”-function so that you can walk your students through the steps in class.

Go to the COCA again and type the word sustainability in the search box. This word serves as an example to show how the “List”-function works.

Limit your search to your virtual corpus by clicking on “Text/Virtual”, select your corpus (here: sustainability) and click on “Find matching strings” (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8: Using the “List”-function

You will find a very short table that tells you how often sustainability appears in the corpus. Click on the word itself (Fig. 9) to obtain a list of examples of texts that feature the noun sustainability (Fig. 10).

Fig. 9: Frequency results of sustainability

These examples are called concordance lines. Click on any number in the top left corner (Fig. 10) to randomise the search and thus gain a more varied overview of how the word is used in different contexts.

Fig. 10: Search result using the “List”-function

3.2 Lesson 1

Plan for the first lesson

Duration: 45 minutes

* = interactive whiteboard, students’ computers/laptops

Tasks and instructions

Warm-up

Wir müssen die Artenvielfalt erhalten.

The warm-up activity serves not only to activate students’ cognitive skills, but also to make them aware of the relevance of corpus work for being able to express themselves accurately and idiomatically in English. For this purpose, select a topic-related sentence in the students’ first language which includes at least one word that is problematic with regard to its translation into English. In this chapter, the German sentence Wir müssen die Artenvielfalt erhalten (‘We need to conserve biodiversity’) has been chosen to highlight the ambiguous meaning of the verb erhalten, which, in other contexts, could just as well be translated as keep, retain or get.

Present the sentence on the board and ask your learners to translate the sentence into English. It is assumed that students will be divided over the translation of the verb erhalten and you can show them the respective entry in a learner dictionary (Fig. 11) to make them aware of the different options for communicating the meanings of erhalten.

Fig. 11: Dictionary entry for erhalten (www.pons.de)

Seeing that there are obviously several possible English translations (maintain, retain, keep, preserve), students will understand that they need another tool to find out which of the translations is appropriate in the example sentence. This point gives you the perfect opportunity to introduce the world of corpora and corpus work generally by subsequently presenting the concordance lines for “verb + biodiversity” using the “Collocates”- function on www.english-corpora.org (Fig. 12).

Fig. 12: Concordance lines for verb + biodiversity (five most frequent verbs)

The warm-up demonstrates that one-to-one translations using dictionaries do not necessarily yield the right results but that research on actual language use in context is needed. By introducing and discussing the concordance lines, you not only provide a first example of data-driven learning, but also give students a taste of what they will be working with during the upcoming lessons. However, you should point out that this list of examples is not representative and does not allow for an immediate conclusion as to which verb is most suitable for translating Wir müssen die Artenvielfalt erhalten. The final answer will be given in the warm-up activity of the next lesson.

Preparation

Before students can start working with the corpus, they need to register on the website and create a virtual corpus. For this purpose, hand out Worksheet A and guide the learners through the instructions (“Preparation of our corpus work”).

Ask a student to come to the front to create their account and the virtual corpus on the interactive whiteboard while giving them the necessary instructions. In the meantime, the other students follow those steps on their own computers.

Practice

As preparation for their task, show your students how to use the “List”-function by going through the steps on the whiteboard while they follow them on their computers. Just as in the preparation phase, use the word sustainability as an example to show how the “List”-function works.

Explain that the resulting concordance lines are the most fundamental function of corpus work, since each of these concordance lines displays a different, authentic, contextual use of the word sustainability.

After this introduction, students can continue with the practice tasks on the worksheet either individually or in pairs. Note that the worksheet includes step-by-step instructions as additional support.

The task requires students to implement what they have learnt about corpus work by searching for nouns that occur with sustainable and aims to expand their vocabulary to improve their language for this project. To this end, students will be asked to write their own sentences using the word combinations they found. Tell your students that they can use these or similar sentences for their project later on.

Use the remaining five to ten minutes of the lesson for the students to share their results (both the words and example sentences from the corpus, and their own sentences) and to talk about and answer issues and questions.

3.3 Lesson 2

Teacher preparation

Collecting vocabulary for the mind map

As an introduction to the lesson students create a mind map of their existing vocabulary knowledge which could be relevant for their chosen topics. The mind map should display the topics that the groups have chosen (Fig. 13).

Fig. 13: Example mind map

You can prepare the main skeleton of the mind map (sustainability in the middle and the topics of the group projects) on the board or, if available, on an interactive whiteboard before the lesson.

Use the teaching material from previous lessons to note down vocabulary that you can expect students to come up with for each of their topics. Additionally, use the corpus to collect more key vocabulary and further ideas to help you guide the discussion in class and to make sure that the key terms for each topic are included in the mind map.

To browse for keywords in the virtual corpus, go to www.english-corpora.org and ensure that you are logged into your account. Then, go to the COCA again and select “Texts/Virtual.” Click on “Edit corpora” to access your virtual corpus (Fig. 14).

Fig. 14: Edit corpora

You now see the page that contains information about your corpus. In the column “FIND KEYWORDS”, click on “NOUNS” (Fig. 15) to obtain a list of nouns that are particularly frequent in your corpus as compared to a large reference corpus of general English (Fig. 16).

Fig. 15: Finding keywords

Fig. 16: Keyword List

Do have in mind that your students will search for collocations during the lesson to expand their vocabulary in this way, meaning the words on the mind map should predominantly be words they have come across before.

When you find words in the keywords list, you can also click on the word to see the concordance lines for this word. This might be helpful to find out in what contexts a word is used, and to make sure that the word is relevant to your students’ topics.

Tasks and instructions

Plan for the second lesson

Duration: 90 minutes

* = interactive whiteboard, students’ computers/laptops

Warm-up

Begin again by presenting your sentence (Wir müssen die Artenvielfalt erhalten.) on the whiteboard and asking the learners: What can you say about the translation of this sentence into English? The following class-discussion partly recaps the content of the last lesson (problem of one-to-one translations, importance of corpus work and collocations). You can now tell them how you used the “Collocates”-function to come up with a list of verbs which are most frequently used in front of biodiversity. Show them the screenshot (Fig. 17) and discuss the results with your students.

Fig. 17: List of verb collocates of biodiversity

At least in American English, preserve is used much more often than maintain. As a matter of fact, it is the verb conserve that is most likely to occur in front of biodiversity, which is surprising given the fact that it was not mentioned at all in the dictionary entry on www.pons.de.

Use this example to briefly explain what collocations are: though conserve, preserve and maintain all translate as erhalten in German, they cannot be used interchangeably. The verb that is most frequently used with biodiversity appears to be conserve. That means that biodiversity collocates most strongly with conserve. This is what we call a collocation: words that are commonly used together.

Introduction (mind mapping)

Present the prepared mind map to the students, and ask them to think about vocabulary for each of the topics. Stress that all students should think about vocabulary for all topics. This way, every group can receive support and inspiration from their peers. Use the vocabulary collected in preparation for the lesson to guide the discussion so that your students collect a variety of words for different contexts, and also use it to add important words that your students do not mention. To provide more context, ask the groups to briefly state the arguments and ideas they want to address in their project to ensure that the collected vocabulary is relevant to the groups’ project idea.

Introduction (vocabulary guide)

After the class discussion, ask your students to get together in their project groups, and hand out Worksheet C (the worksheet should either be printed in an A3 format or made available as a document on their computers). Explain that this worksheet is a vocabulary guide that the students will devise themselves to prepare for elaborating their products.

Ask the students to fill in the “Draft structure” column with a brief version of the draft structure they have developed in earlier lessons. Afterwards, they should use the mind map to decide on six keywords that are most central to their ideas and topics, and write them in the “Keywords” column (Fig. 18). Ask them to include nouns as well as verbs and adjectives.

Fig. 18: Example table for the introductory task (worksheet C)

Preparation

After the groups have completed the second column, students should turn to their computers or laptops. Hand out Worksheet B and go through it together. Make sure that all students have a basic understanding of what collocations are, then guide them through the step-by-step instructions while demonstrating the steps on www.english-corpora.org on screen, using sustainability as an example (Fig. 19).

Fig. 19: Search form for the collocation task

Help your students to understand how the results page (Fig. 20) works as it will look confusing at first: The words are grouped according to their part of speech (POS) and the colours refer to their frequency. The boxes to the left above the table display the word they searched for and its part of speech (e.g., noun). If they have searched for a word that could be more than one POS, they would find an option to switch the POS right next to it (e.g., make can be both a verb and a noun).

Fig. 20: Results page

Note that students should not click on the words but on the text icon next to the words to see the concordance lines (Fig. 21). Clicking on the word itself redirects to the collocations of that particular word. If you then go back to the previous page and request the concordance lines again, the interface will show you the concordance lines for the word you clicked on before rather than the concordance lines for sustainability (your search word). To fix this error, you need to launch your search again.

Tip: It might help to ask your students to ensure that two different words are highlighted in the concordance lines, one of which should be their search term. If that is not the case, the aforementioned error has been made and the students need to go back to the search form.

When going to the concordance lines, do not forget to randomise your search by clicking on a number after “Find sample”.

After going through the instructions, students form pairs and search for collocations of sustainable with the help of the step-by-step-guide to practise using the “Collocates”-function.

Tell your students to use the checklist on Worksheet B as a guideline to help them choose suitable collocations: Point out that students should look for new words rather than words that they have used already in the lesson before, i.e., focusing on verbs, adjectives and adverbs rather than nouns. They should also check that they understand how to use the word by checking the example sentences from the concordance lines. By writing a sentence for each collocation themselves, students can test whether they have really understood how to use the collocation in context.

Practice: Working on the project

Ask your students to get back together in their project groups and use the step-by-step guide, as well as the checklist on their worksheet (Worksheet B), to search for collocations for the keywords they have chosen (Worksheet C, Fig. 21). They can refer to the tasks on sustainable for support. Students then work on completing the table in their groups. Ask your students to underline the construction in the example sentences in which the collocation occurs.

Fig. 21: Worksheet C

After finishing the table, students can use the new words and example sentences to write their own sentences with the collocations or to start the first paragraph of their final project. Students need to apply the collocation in a construction that mirrors the one from the respective example sentence.

Finish the lesson with a class discussion on the results of the group work.

4 Options and further ideas

Differentiation

The worksheets and the step-by-step guide will provide enough scaffolding for most students to be able to work on the tasks independently in their groups. However, for more support you could reduce the number of collocations and/or the number of keywords for individual groups or the whole class, or fill in parts of the vocabulary guide (Worksheet C), e.g., the “Collocations” column, and leave the rest of the table for the students to complete it, e.g., the “Example sentences” column.

Additional tasks

During the writing process, the “Collocates”-function can be continuously used to help students write their texts, e.g., by looking up collocations during the writing phase when they are unsure how to use words correctly, using the “Collocates”-function to improve their first drafts: Ask your students to read through their own (or another group’s) text and extract a certain number of phrases which they would like to improve. Then ask them to find collocations for these words to express their idea in a more idiomatic way.

5 Caveats and limitations

The lessons depend heavily on the availability of end devices for all students; it is assumed that each student has a computer, laptop or tablet they can use in class. If that is not the case, you can adjust the exercises by forming groups for the tasks.

Moreover, a secure and stable internet connection is necessary for these tasks, which the teacher should test in advance. Nonetheless, it is possible that the website gets overloaded if all students simultaneously search for the same things. This can be solved by forming pairs or groups that work on one computer at a time.

6 Conclusion

Although the outline of this project may appear labour-intensive at first, it sets the basis for further corpus-based learning and is therefore quite sustainable and time-saving in the long run. Once the teacher and students have acquired the necessary technical skills, they can be used again and expanded in future projects on any topic. Most importantly, students not only learn how to obtain linguistic support for their writing, but also develop a deeper understanding of how language works, i.e., in patterns rather than by the combination of individual words. Learning new words and phrases in context by actively and autonomously searching for collocations that suit their needs, students are likely to remember the new words better and to use them idiomatically. In this way, the designed lessons are in line with current evidence from second language acquisition research, which highlights the importance of rich exposure, noticing, learner relevance, and emotional as well as cognitive engagement.

7 Resources and references

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2015. Kerncurriculum für die integrierte Gesamtschule, Schulgänge 5-10: Englisch. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?p=download&upload=66.

Figures used on Worksheet A: https://www.digitale-nachhaltigkeit.ch/icons-voraussetzungen/ and https://www.english-corpora.org/images/words.jpg

Figure used on Worksheet B: https://pixnio.com/objects/toys/puzzle-pieces-symbol-connect-hand-jigsaw

8 Appendix

Worksheet A

Worksheet B

Worksheet C

1 Introduction and rationale

Enabling learners of English to debate current issues that dominate public discourse is a key communicative aim of teaching English. As a major vector of climate change, pollution makes for an ideal debating topic for the English language classroom. However, given that it is a specialised topic, it can be difficult for teachers and learners to access the appropriate vocabulary and idiomatic phrases to do so successfully. The corpus built in this step-by-step guide to conducting corpus linguistics research helps teachers to compile lists of authentic articles and useful idiomatic phrases on the topic of pollution. The chapter will also introduce examples of how to implement the corpus findings in teaching materials. According to the English curriculum of Lower Saxony (Germany), dealing with topics from different school subjects in bilingual teaching is a highly motivating and effective way of acquiring a second language (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 31). Climate change is one of the core topics featured in the geography and chemistry curriculum (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2015: 14) for grades 9 and 10 at Gymnasium (advanced secondary school in Germany), whilst also touching on contents from biology and politics.

Interdisciplinary climate change education “helps people understand and address the impact of global warming, increases ‘climate literacy’ among young people, encourages changes in their attitudes and behaviour, and helps them adapt to climate change related trends” (Unesco, n.d.). Pollution is a serious global issue that is addressed in political discussions. Therefore, the topic is very prevalent in students’ daily private lives. Many young people attend the Fridays for Future demonstrations, thus potentially increasing the students’ interest in the topic. Enabling students to communicate central issues of pollution in English is thus a meaningful preparation for encounters outside the classroom.

2 Corpus, tools and methods

The News on the Web (NOW) corpus on english-corpora.org includes a range of broadsheet newspapers such as The Guardian, as well as tabloid press such as the Daily Mail. The corpus thus reflects the language input of the general public because there is a variety of written articles on the topic composed for different audiences. It is a rich source of frequent vocabulary useful for talking about scientific and political issues, as well as idiomatic phrases demonstrating how to use the new vocabulary in context. This kind of authentic language is very important for designing materials for the English as a Foreign Language classroom.

3 Step-by-step guide

Teacher preparation

Corpus compilation

Step 1: Registering on english-corpora.org

To be able to access the NOW corpus, register on english-corpora.org and select the corpus by clicking on “News on the Web (NOW)” in the table.

Fig. 1: Accessing the News on the Web corpus through english-corpora.org

Step 2: Creating a virtual corpus

The “FIND TEXTS” function allows you to create a virtual corpus based on keywords. To use this function, type in your keyword in the query box; in this case it is pollution. Second, select Texts/Virtual tab and then click on “FIND TEXTS” (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Creating a virtual corpus with the keyword pollution

Third, select Options and type in your desired number of results in the “#HITS” box. To ensure a greater variety of texts, 1,000 texts could be retrieved. To see the results, select “Find matching strings” once you have adjusted the settings as described above (see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Adjusting the settings of the virtual corpus

Next, you will see a list of texts that form your personal virtual corpus. You can click on the “SAVE LIST” option at the top left corner of the list to save your virtual corpus and to access it at any time in the future.

Designing corpus-based teaching materials

Task 1

To find certain keywords in your corpus, you can select e.g.“NOUN” to find specific nouns in your corpus. This option appears in your “virtual corpora” list next to the name of your saved corpus (see Fig. 4). If you click on “NOUN”, a list of nouns and their frequencies in your corpus will appear. If you then click on a word from this list, e.g. emission (see Fig. 5), a list is displayed showing in which context the word emission is used in the newspaper articles of your virtual corpus, alongside the date of the article, the website it was published on, and further information. You can also click on the number in the left column to see the expanded context in which the word is being used (see Fig. 6).

Fig. 4: “Find keywords” option

Fig. 5: List of nouns

Fig. 6: List of results for the noun emission

For the warm-up activity, which in this lesson will be the vocabulary game Last Man Standing, the teacher needs to prepare a list of vocabulary for the students to learn before this lesson.

This vocabulary list contains important vocabulary on the topic of pollution. The list will include the English word with three typical collocations and an example sentence in which the word is used.

To create this list, use the “FIND KEYWORDS” function and select as many nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. as needed for the vocabulary list (see Fig. 4).

There is going to be a huge collection of words to select from. It is therefore important to choose them carefully with your students in mind. First of all, you can find the most frequent nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. in your virtual corpus on pollution (see Fig. 4). Of course, not every word is going to be relevant for your students. It is helpful to view the text(s) that the students will read in the second task as a comparison in order to see which of the listed words may be necessary to understand them. Furthermore, Francine Johnston’s article How to Select Words for Vocabulary Instruction provides handy criteria for the selection. Some of the criteria Johnston mentioned are “importance” and “transferability” of words (Johnston, n.d). Teachers should ask themselves what important words their students need to learn in order to understand the selection of texts and to successfully hold a debate on their own.

The next step after having chosen the appropriate vocabulary is to find two to three collocations per word. To start off, e.g. type in emission in your virtual pollution corpus (from 4.1.1) and choose the function “Collocates” (see Fig. 7).

Fig. 7: Finding collocations

Under Options, is also helpful to select “GROUP BY: LEMMAS” instead of the default “WORDS” (see Fig. 8) because the different inflections of verbs and nouns are then grouped together.

Fig. 8: Group by lemmas

There are several options to look for useful collocations of the word. For example, you can type in an asterisk (*) in the second search box to look for all word classes. Another option is to specifically search for a word class such as verbs in order to find out which verbs are frequently associated with the word in texts about pollution (see Fig. 8). It may be necessary to vary the number of positions before or after the word depending on what word class you are looking for. Verbs, for example, are often several word positions before a noun. You can change the collocational range you are searching for by adjusting the numbers between +4 and 4+. The range queried is highlighted in green (see Fig. 7).

In this case, the verb meet was the most frequent verb collocate of emission within our virtual pollution corpus (see Fig. 9).

Fig. 9: Selecting collocations

However, a brief look at the concordance lines of meet reveals that meet + emission(s) never occurs on its own (see Fig. 10). Instead, the verb meet collocates with emission norms/standards/targets and other semantically related nouns.

Fig. 10: Concordance lines for meet

When creating your own collocation list, please keep in mind that a certain inflection of a word may be more idiomatic than others. For example, while looking for verb + emission collocations, it becomes clear that the plural of emission, i.e. emissions, is used much more frequently. The same is true for adjective or noun + emission. The singular form of emission, on the other hand, is mostly found in emission + noun constructions, i. e. emission standards. As a tip, an easy way to check this is to search for different inflections in a corpus while using the setting “GROUP BY: WORDS”. The frequency will help you to decide which inflections should be included in the collocations you decide to include in your teaching materials.

In addition, learners are known to find example sentences most useful. Make sure that they are from your corpus to ensure authenticity. An example of what a finished vocabulary list could look like can be found in the appendix.

Task 2: Instructions for one example text

The second task prepares the students for their roles in the debate. To do this, the teacher needs to prepare a variety of texts for each group in advance. The texts should inform the students about pollution and ideally contain useful information and arguments which can then be used in the debate. In the following, two ways of finding appropriate texts are outlined.

Option 1: Searching for a text in your own virtual corpus

For this lesson, this option was chosen to find the ideal articles for the reading task. The virtual corpus includes many great articles that suit the purpose of this lesson. To find a text in your individual corpus, select your virtual corpus. In this case, it is the pollution corpus that was created in 4.1.1. (see Fig. 11). Within this corpus, you have a variety of texts that you can choose from. Next, you can click through the websites to find the perfect text(s) for the lesson (see Fig. 12).

Fig. 11: List of virtual corpora

Fig. 12: Selection of articles within virtual corpus on pollution

Option 2: Searching for a text in the NOW corpus

This second option enables you to search through the entire NOW corpus by simply typing in a keyword. In this example, the term air pollution is used. In addition, it is possible to specify the dates of publication for the texts in your search (see Fig. 13). The more recent the texts are, the more likely it is that the full text will still available on the publisher’s website.

Fig. 13: Search settings in the NOW corpus

Next, you will see a list of websites that have published articles featuring the word or topic that you searched for. Once you have found an interesting website, you can click on the number on the left column to obtain further information about the context in which your query word is used. In this case, no. 58 was chosen, which is an article from The Guardian (see Fig. 14).

Fig. 14: Selection of articles within the NOW corpus

Fig. 15: Selected article (here: from the newspaper The Guardian)

You can now click on the number in the left column to see the expanded context in which the word is being used (see Fig. 15).

You will also find a link to the article (see Fig. 16).

Fig. 16: Source information and expanded context

Four example texts we suggest could be used for this task are linked in the appendix, though your own selection of texts will, of course, depend on your students’ proficiency levels, needs and interests.

Task 3

The final task of the session is the debate. For this task, it is necessary to prepare a list of useful phrases for engaging in a debate. Teachers should provide their students with the list so that they can study it in advance. It will guide the learners through the debate and support them if needed. You may adjust your list to your students’ needs by, for example, removing the translation into students’ first language and leaving an empty column instead. This leaves space for your students to fill in their own translation, or other notes that they may find useful.

At this point, the students are already prepared and have acquired information and arguments for their specific roles.

Lesson plan

Instructions for tasks

Task 1: Vocabulary Game – Last Man Standing (warm-up activity)

The teacher names the topic, pollution, for which the students have already learnt the vocabulary for homework ahead of the lesson. At the beginning, all of the students have to stand up and the teacher throws a ball to a student who has to come up with a word that fits that topic. That student throws the ball to the next student who again has to come up with another word. Students who catch the ball and cannot come up with a word have to sit down. This game continues until there is only one student left standing. The last standing student is the winner of the game.

Task 2.1: Reading

The teacher presents the motion of the debate “Preventing Pollution Is Not a Matter of Money”. In the first stage of the Jigsaw method, the students are divided into five expert groups. Each group will be assigned one of the roles.

First of all, informative texts are handed out to the first four groups with potential arguments supporting the position they will have to defend. These texts include reading tasks to help them filter and develop arguments for the debate. Moreover, they will have to think about strategies to communicate these arguments in the debate. The fifth group is the group of moderators. It is best suited for high ability students. These students have access to all four texts in order to prepare for their role. They will be in charge of opening the debate, facilitating transitions between arguments, encouraging everyone to participate actively and asking questions whenever needed.

Task 2.2: Exchanging arguments

Students who have been assigned the same role form groups and review their arguments. This step encourages the students to think about possible ways to support each other’s arguments, thus strengthening their side of the motion. The students should also think about possible arguments from the opposing side and come up with potential rebuttals.

Task 3: Debate

For the debate, new discussion groups are formed; those discussion groups include at least one representative of each expert group. This means that each discussion group has a representative of each role plus a moderator who is going to be in charge of structuring as well as keeping the debate going. The purpose of this format is to encourage every student to participate actively.

4 Options and further ideas

Option:

The teacher could create a pro and con group for low ability learners who may obtain texts that are easier to understand and/or include additional information such as graphs, images or an additional vocabulary list.

Further idea:

Fish Bowl debate for the follow-up lesson:

Fishbowl is a strategy for organizing medium- to large-group discussions. Students are separated into an inner and outer circle. In the inner circle, or fishbowl, students have a discussion; students in the outer circle listen to the discussion and take notes (tolerance.org, n.d.).

A Fish Bowl debate gives students the opportunity to present their findings in front of the whole class while the observers note down the structure of the debate, as well as the vocabulary employed. That way, the teacher is able to retrace how well the Jigsaw classroom worked out and the students can use their results in a bigger context while revising the acquired vocabulary and debating strategiesonce more.

5 Caveats and limitations

In order to create such a lesson, it is important to become familiar with english-corpora.org and not lose your patience at the first mishap! Error messages, resulting e.g. from forgetting to put a space or ticking the wrong box, are certainly frustrating. Nonetheless, the results obtained from working with a corpus are very reliable and enable you to find vocabulary that goes over and beyond what textbooks include, thus expanding the vocabulary taught in a more authentic way. Textbooks and other lists might include vocabulary around specific topics such as pollution, but the corpus allows you to look for frequent idiomatic phrases and collocations and to explore the wider context in which they are used.

Another difficulty might occur for non-paying users of english-corpora.org, who regularly receive a notification to upgrade their account. This can be ignored. After a few seconds of waiting, the search can be continued. Additionally, when creating the virtual corpus, it is important to choose a keyword that is often used in the desired context. It is worth comparing results from different keywords because the use of a good keyword is crucial to create a reliable virtual corpus. Depending on the learning group, the complexity of the tasks and the debate can vary. At first, students may be overwhelmed by the debating task, or else they might find it highly motivating and will be very spontaneous in their contributions. It is important to consider the specific learning group, that the necessary vocabulary has been introduced beforehand, and that the students are familiar with the concept of such a debate.

6 Conclusion

Even though preparing the vocabulary list may take some time, in our opinion, the result is very rewarding because you end up with a list of frequent, authentic examples that can always be reused or extended in future lessons. Moreover, this method can be applied to a whole range of other topics. Once the teacher has worked with this method once, they will always be able to go back and repeat the steps, applyingthe methodto a different topic. Teacher preparation time will considerably decrease once they have gotten used to the method.

7 Resources

News On The Web Corpus (NOW). https://www.english-corpora.org/now/.

8 References

Climate.gov. 2009. What is Climate Literacy? https://www.climate.gov/teaching/essential-principles-climate-literacy/what-climate-science-literacy (09 January, 2021).

Englisch Hilfen. n.d. Diskussionen auf Englisch – Wichtige Wendungen. https://www.englisch-hilfen.de/words/diskussionen.htm (31 July, 2020).

Johnston, Francine. n.d. How to Select Words for Vocabulary Instruction. https://assets.pearsonschool.com/asset_mgr/current/201640/Francine_ArticleForResearch.pdf (31 July, 2020).

Lehrerfortbildung-bw.de. n.d. Material 12: Debate vocabulary. https://lehrerfortbildung-bw.de/u_sprachlit/englisch/gym/bp2004/fb1/binnendiff/2_ue_mat/mat14/ (04 August, 2020).

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2019. Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium, Schuljahrgänge 5-10: Chemie. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?skey_lev0_0=Schulbereich&svalue_lev0_0=Sek+I&skey_lev0_1=Fach&svalue_lev0_1=Chemie&skey_lev0_2=Dokumentenart&svalue_lev0_2=Kerncurriculum&docid=1061&p=detail_view (15 July, 2020).

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2015. Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium, Schuljahrgänge 5-10: Erdkunde. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?skey_lev0_0=Schulbereich&svalue_lev0_0=Sek+I&skey_lev0_1=Fach&svalue_lev0_1=Erdkunde&skey_lev0_2=Dokumentenart&svalue_lev0_2=Kerncurriculum&docid=1112&p=detail_view (15 July, 2020).

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2015. Kerncurriculum für das Gymnasium, Schuljahrgänge 5-10: Englisch. https://cuvo.nibis.de/cuvo.php?skey_lev0_0=Schulbereich&svalue_lev0_0=Sek+I&skey_lev0_1=Fach&svalue_lev0_1=Englisch&skey_lev0_2=Dokumentenart&svalue_lev0_2=Kerncurriculum&docid=1197&p=detail_view (15 July, 2020).

Tolerance.org Website. n.d. Teaching Strategy – Fish Bowl. https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-resources/teaching-strategies/community-inquiry/fishbowl#:~:text=Fishbowl%20is%20a%20strategy%20for,the%20discussion%20and%20take%20notes (12 August, 2020).

Unesco Website. n.d. Climate Change Education and Awareness. https://en.unesco.org/themes/addressing-climate-change/climate-change-education-and-awareness#:~:text=Education%20is%20an%20essential%20element,to%20climate%20change%20related%20trends (15 July, 2020)

9 Appendix

Pictures

Picture impulse

Collage of six images. Image credits below.

Image credits (left to right, top row first):

1. “Solar Panels” by RecondOil is licensed under CC BY 2.0
2. “Climate change – environment” by RecondOil is licensed under CC BY 2.0
3. “MY NEW ENVIRON-MENTALIST FAKE!” by The PIX-JOCKEY (visual fantasist) is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
4. “Coal power plant” by eutrophication&hypoxia is licensed under CC BY 2.0
5. “Global Warming (Effetto Serra)” by The PIX-JOCKEY (visual fantasist) is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
6. “environment pollution” by RecondOil is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Cartoon for homework

“091207usatoday global warming.91” by RedMonk Red is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Worksheets

Vocabulary list

Here is an example of what a vocabulary list with collocations could look like:

This is an example of the reading task that could be assigned to each group.

Here are links to some example texts you may use. These should be adjusted to your students’ needs.

PRO GROUP

• Representative of an environmental organization
  http://redgreenandblue.org/2020/05/10/pollution-kills-9-million-people-year-okay/
• Young student who supports Fridays for Future
  https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/2016/12/02/what-you-need-to-know-about-air-pollution-its-importance-and-effective-solutions/#gref

CON GROUP

• CEO of a successful car manufacturer
  https://www.dw.com/en/german-car-lovers-want-to-challenge-fridays-for-future/a-51465631
• Parent of four who cannot afford an environmentally-friendly lifestyle
  https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/29/eco-friendly-going-green-poor-cost-diary