Background

In recent decades, how to help students learn and use real language patterns has posed a big challenge for English teachers. Traditional tools (e.g., textbooks, dictionaries, other published materials, etc.) and teachers’ intuition are unable to fully address this issue. This is an area where corpus linguistics can fill the gap. Using corpus data allows teachers and students to study naturally occurring English language and learn grammatical patterns, collocations and appropriate registers. Students can also use corpora to explore authentic language data and answer their own queries about the English language, as well as to become more independent and autonomous language learners. 

Despite the wide recognition of contribution of corpus linguistics, to language learning, the corpus-based approach remains largely unkown to most teachers in primary and secondary schools. In this workshop series, Dr. Ma Qing introduced an innovative corpus-based approach in language teaching – Corpus-based Language Pedagogy. The workshop series provide concrete examples and demonstrates how a corpus-based lesson can be designed in four steps: (1) testing students’ knowledge, i.e., detecting language errors; (2) hands-on corpus search by students, i.e., looking for language patterns; (3) inductive discovery by students, e.g., summarising language patterns; and (4) output activities, i.e., active usage of newly learned words. Dr. Ma Qing hopes that these pedagogical strategies can inspire both pre- and in-service teachers with innovative ideas to design their corpus-based English lessons.

Details

Below is the schedule of the workshop series in 2020: