Week 7

Corpus for Classrooms: Ideas for Material 

Design Neveen Al Saeed & Salma Waly

✨Advantages

✶Corpora helped students to learn about certain language uses that were not available in any of the traditional tools. 

✶Corpora allowed students to examine these language features in context.

✶Corpora helped students get a broader view of language.

✶Corpora could help improve students’ language proficiency.

✨Disadvantages

✶Disadvantage is that some corpus software is not available for students

✷Students are confused because of the large amounts of search results that when searching any corpus.

✨Corpus-based Activities and Ideas for Material Design 

Elementary students: Collocations: make/do

✶Verb pairing game

✶Computer cloze activity

Intermediate students: Modal verbs

✶Contextual Analysis

✶Cloze activities

✶Multiple-choices

✶Express yourself

Upper intermediate students: Phrasal verbs 

✶Cloze activity

Advanced students: Idiomatic Expressions: 

✶Concordance Analysis

✶Pragmatics: Situation analysis  

Week 6

Modal Auxiliary in British English: 

A Corpus-Based Study of Modality Through British National Corpus

⭐BNCweb is the concordance software that accesses this copy of the BNC. With BNCweb, you can search the entire BNC, or limit yourself to just part of it.

⭐Objectives

         BNCweb will e specifically applied through chosen modal verbs in order to:

        1. shed some light on modal verbs of which meanings are difficult to make distinction on theoretical background.

        2. affirm that modalities can be interchangeable due to different contexts, such as gender, type of data, perceived level of difficulty and etc.

⭐Method Three modal verbs ("should", "have to" and "must") will be scrutinized by available functions ("distribution", "collocation" and "concordance") via BNCweb in order to offer empirical information, such as grammatical usage and discursive practice, of modalities in British context. Details of methodology in each function will be subsequently explained in results and discussion section. 

Week 5

Using corpus analysis software to analyse specialised texts

🌞Corpus as a collection f naturally-occurring texts in a computer-readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software.

🌞We use Antconc to analyzed texts.

🌞Sources of language copora

     -http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk

     -http://corpus.byu.edu/

     -http://www.arts.chula.ac.th

🌞Designing a specialized corpus

     -Corpus size

     -Text extracts vs. full texts

     -Number of texts

     -Medium

     -Subject and text type

     -Other considerations

🌞Sources of specialised texts

     -Printed materials software

     -Word document texts

     -CD-ROMS

     -Texts on the web

     -Online databases

💙Week 4 Digital Writing: Enhancing Ways of Teaching and Learning Writing💙

1. What are the problems struggling writers have in writing classes?

👉The learners usually have poor handwriting  and writes slowly or illegibly.

👉The learners  have problems in expressing their idea through composition.

👉The learners have trouble communicating and understanding their teachers and peers during discussion in the classroom.

👉Many struggling writers’ primary writing problems involve a lack of confidence.

👉Struggling writers are likely to develop negative attitudes towards writing and, thus, often have low motivation to write.

2. What does 'digital writing' refer to?

Digital writing is becoming a standard way of life for young learners within Generation M.

3. What are the three digital writing tools? Give brief descriptions?

👉Blogs 

         💗A blog is a discussion, informational article or personal journal, published on the World Wide Web, which is often frequently updated.

👉Instant Messaging (IM) – MSN, Line, Twitter, Skype, chat-room 

        💗Instant Messaging (IM) is a form of Internet-based, real time text communication between users on the same system.

👉Social Network Site (SNS) 

        💗A social network site (SNS) is a website or an online service platform in which people share interest, create a public or semi-public profile, and interact with other users.

4. How has digital writing enhanced the teaching of writing?

👉They provide opportunities for users to use nicknames or pseudonyms.

👉Learners actually type out what they want to communicate to the group or readers.

👉Digital writing promotes learners’ equity in terms of interaction.

👉Increases student-centered learning.

👉Encourages collaborative learning

👉digital writing involves different modes of representation combining text, audio, video, still images, animation, and/or interactive features.

5. What are the things that you should take into consideration to employ digital writing for teaching academic writing?

👍Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing

👍Computer professional, or an IT professional

6. Which activity do you like most? Why?

         💗Activity 2: Guess Who because it's very exciting to guess who our partners are.

And it challenges us to guess anyone, it also shows our ability that who are sagacious people.

😊Week 3 Summary: The Use of Multimedia in English Teaching😊

From The Use of Multimedia in English Teaching by Zhang Zhen . It can summary that.................
🔎What is Multimedia?
 Multimedia is the use of computers to present text, graphics, video, animation, and sound in an integrated way.
🔎What is the component of multimedia?
There are text, graphics,animation, sound and video.
🔎Why we choose multimedia to assist English teaching?
💥Advantages
- The students will interest in the lesson more.
- The students can learning English independently.
- The students can imagine and create the new thing.
- It is a good opportunities for practicing language.
- Save time , the teachers aren't spend a lot of time  for writing on the whiteboard or blackboard.
- The students will clear in the lesson more.
💥Disadvantages
- Teachers use appropriate multimedia for example some teachers bought CD-ROM courseware for their lesson that is to say that behavior can decrease the role of teacher.
- Some students can't understand in the short time.
- Some teachers can't use multimedia because they lack of special ability.
- Teachers lack of diligence and creation on the multimedia technology.
- The interaction between teachers and students is lesser.
🔎How to make good use of multimedia?
- Coordinate the methods between Modern Teaching and Traditional Teaching Methods.
- Make a relationship between teachers and students.

Safe & Sound feat. The Civil Wars

😍Week 2 Summary: Weblogs enhancing ELF students' English language learning😍

From Weblogs enhancing ELF students' English language learning by Usa Noytim. It can summary that.................
💥The purpose
1. To inspect students' perception of using weblogs.
2. To inspect the attitude toward using weblogs.
💥Place
This study investigated the potential value of Weblog use on English language learning in the context of a university in Thailand.
💥The participants of this research
The participants of this research were twenty- undergraduate English major female students in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nakhon Pathom Rajabhat University.
💥Tools
1.Short questionnaires
2.Analysed questionnaires
3.Interview questionnaires
💥Finding
1. Extent of knowledge and Experience with weblogs
    There are fourteen students had the internet at home. Thirteen students had no prior experience to use weblog before studying the course Reading and Writing for Academy Purposes II. Most twelve students did not use Weblogs in their life. And eight students sometimes used Weblogs to contact or discuss with friends.
2.Potential values of Weblogs
   There are many advantage of weblogs use for instance Weblogs as a medium of self-expression online, a tool to develop English language, a good chance to develop writing and reading skill with discuss with other people, encourage their creative, analytical and critical thinking skill and it also created social interaction.
3. Student reactions to Weblog use
    They have a positive attitude and intention to continue using. In addition, nineteen students expect to teacher and friends add comment on their blog. Furthermore, some student tell the disadvantage of blog such as time investment and plagiarism.
4. The Blogs
    Student's blogs and comment were counted and read. The result show 200 blog entries and 898 comment. The blog that is higher number of comment was 158 comment
💥Discussion and Conclusion
     - Weblogs fostered student's self-expression.
     - The students have more confidence in writing.
    - Blogs can comment by every people. Sometimes the foreigner will confirm a real and global audience.
    - The student like the comment easily and easier to exchange idea and also encourage their analytical and critical thinking skills.
     - Blogs fostered a social interjection.
     - Blogs promote student's creative thinking.