Previous Workshops – Vocabulary

Abstract

Word knowledge and usage are more easily accessible through corpora than other traditional tools, such as dictionaries. The corpus workshop series – vocabulary conducted by Dr. Ma Qing, Angel introduces some free online corpora to school teachers and provided guidance on how to explore corpus data and discover authentic use of vocabulary/collocations. Corpus-based vocabulary teaching materials/activities for both primary and secondary teachers are showcased, and design principles of which are delineated.

Details of previous workshops:

Summary

The workshop series on vocabulary provided opportunities for teachers to develop hands-on corpus-aided activities to facilitate vocabulary learning. Sharing her insights and experiences about a new language pedagogy – Corpus-based Language Pedagogy (CBLP), Dr. Ma has been explicating how prospective teachers and in-service teachers can make full use of corpora as teaching resources.

In her workshop series, Dr. Ma usually began by exposing some frequent lexical errors made by Hong Kong or Chinese students, and showcased different ways to provide them with unlimited authentic language data, i.e., corpus data. After introducing a few key concepts of corpus linguistics to the participants, she taught participants the basic skills to use some free online corpora and concordances such as Corpus Concordance English and Word and Phrase. She then provided teacher participants with hands-on experience on how to explore corpus data and observe real language use patterns using Word and Phrase, Lextutor and/or COCA. Below were some of the language queries and specific teaching difficulties on teaching lexis the workshop concerned:

• • Query 1: How can we find the use pattern of the verb insist?
  • Query 2: How can we help students discover their errors in using connectors?
  • Query 3: How can we discover collocations using corpora?
  • Query 4: How can we help students distinguish synforms, especially word pairs containing –ic/-ical ?
  • Query 5: How to help students self-correct their own errors in writing?

After sharing some corpus-based vocabulary teaching materials/activities for teacher participants, Dr. Ma concluded with a four-step model for designing teaching/learning activities to create corpus-aided teaching materials. In the end, group discussions and Q&A were conducted for school teachers to share some corpus-based teaching experience and suggestions.

Previous Workshops – English Chinese Parallel

Abstract

In this workshop series, an English-Chinese parallel corpus developed at the EdUHK was introduced to help teachers and students to understand the value of parallel texts in language teaching and learning. Dr. Wang Lixun demonstrated how learning materials can be developed based on the parallel corpus data to help language learners to compare the English and Chinese language systems, and gain a better understanding of the two languages through comparative language studies.

Details of previous workshops:

Summary

Parallel concordancing allows us to place side by side for comparison two contexts produced for a given item – phrase, word, or morpheme – one being a translation of the other. Dr. Wang drew the attention of participants specifically to his self-developed English-Chinese Parallel Corpus (http://corpus.eduhk.hk/paraconc/) and explained how this parallel concordancing in English and Chinese contributes to the success of a language teaching class. Dr. Wang introduced the concept of ‘English-Chinese Parallel Corpus’, and how we can make use of parallel concordancing in language teaching, specifically to raise learners’ awareness of the differences between English and Chinese. He demonstrated the basic skills for using the parallel corpus and introduced parallel corpus-based English-Chinese comparative searches at three levels:

1. 1. Lexical level
   2. Syntactical level
   3. Discourse level

At the lexical level, Dr. Wang gave ample examples, such as ‘Good vs. 好’, ‘Now vs. 現在’. At the syntactic level, he shared his previous students’ research on the differences in marking the passive voice in English and Chinese using the parallel corpus. He also shared other students’ research on the differences in information structuring between English and Chinese. In terms of pedagogical implications of the parallel corpus, Dr. Wang’s workshop highlighted the following benefits:

1. 1. Raising language awareness (Data-driven learning)
   2. Overcoming cultural difference
   3. Using translation studies
   4. Benefiting teachers with limited command of the L2
   5. Facilitating self-study of a foreign language
   6. Easily creating teaching materials

Dr. Wang concluded the workshops by elaborating how learning materials can be developed based on the parallel corpus. In the end, participants were given direct experience of the parallel corpus by a series of connected tutorial tasks.

Previous Workshops – Pronunciation

Abstract

In the workshop series conducted by Dr. Rebecca Chen, she introduced a corpus-based pronunciation learning system and the use of learner corpora. The main objectives is to help English learners and teachers to identify Chinese learners’ recurrent segmental (vowels and consonants) and suprasegmental (lexical stress, pausing, linking, and intonation) difficulties in learning English pronunciation. Dr. Chen also suggested possible remedies that may reduce such difficulties. Several sets of ready-made, corpus-aided English pronunciation lesson plans and teaching materials were provided to introduce the corpus-aided teaching and learning approach for learners at different levels.

Details of previous workshops:

Summary

Pronunciation is more difficult than people assumed because it is hard to mark down the difference in pronunciation without IPA. Thus, Dr. Chen showed the participants how to teach IPA and use spoken corpora as a resource to find out common mistakes of Chinese students compared with native speakers. Using the speech accent archive, the International Dialects of English Archive, and self-developed spoken corpora, she explained the advantages of using learner corpora to identify Chinese students’ recurrent difficulties in English pronunciation. She also provided possible remedies to reduce the difficulty in learning pronunciation. Her workshops were ideal targeted for:

• • Undergraduates to train their pronunciation through self-access learning activities;
  • Teacher trainees (e.g. PGDE/MATESOL students) to collect and analyse the authentic data; &
  • Frontline Teachers to use the corpus-informed pronunciation teaching resources.

In addition, Dr. Chen shared corpus-based lesson plans designed by school teachers at both the primary and secondary levels. In the workshop in 2017, she invited one of her student teachers to share his self-designed teaching plan involving the spoken corpus (see also the video clip). The student teacher illustrated how he made use of the corpus to teach pronunciation items:

• • Teaching Schwa with the corpus
  • Teaching Linking with the corpus
  • Teaching Stress and Rhyme with the corpus

Previous Workshops – Grammar

Abstract

Students have been taught a large number of prescriptive grammar rules in English classes. These rules are well embraced by some teachers whose understanding of grammar is based primarily on structure rather than function. If their students do not follow the prescriptive rules, they are likely to be given a big red cross. Dr. Jackie Lee’s workshop series helped teachers distinguish between “deterministic” grammar and “probabilistic” grammar. It showed them teachers can make use of corpus data to help students find out what forms are most likely to occur in particular contexts, and make grammatical choices to create meanings.

Details of previous workshops:

Summary

In Dr. Jackie Lee’s workshops, participants were provided with opportunities to explore how corpus tools to enhance English grammar teaching.

The workshops first gave an overview of corpora available for grammar teaching, then discussed how corpus-based data can enhance lexico-grammar instruction and self-study. Dr. Lee’s workshops emphasised that the conventional deductive approach to grammar learning in traditional textbooks is not enough for learners, because grammar rules are usually deduced from discrete and uncontextualized sentences, or in the form of gap-fills. Therefore, the workshops introduced the inductive approach to grammar teaching using corpus tools to broaden students’ learning styles and to cater to their needs. Her workshops inspired participants to make grammar learning more enjoyable and motivating. Through designing consciousness-raising activities with real language data from corpora, teachers could lead students to find out the target language forms and create meanings through different syntactic choices.