Exploring Corpus Data : A Digital Way to Store Authentic Material

Welcome back folks. I'm back and better than ever. Today, we will be talking about data-driven learning, corpus data and digital ways to reach authentic materials.

Authentic materials are produced for native and local people, meaning that they do not have teaching concerns. Authentic materials provide learners with everyday and natural use of the language. Learning languages are not equal to learning other subjects such as math or geography, furthermore, they cannot be learned by only sitting in the classroom and listening to the teacher. A language requires effort to learn and understand. Authentic materials are exactly designed for these reasons.

Corpus Data is where this authentic materials are stored. You can see CorpusData and CorpusMate as examples of these storages. You can search quite literally everything that exists in the English language and you will find authentic uses of what you are looking for.

My friends İlayda, Melike and I prepared a lesson plan to encourage our students to make use of data-driven learning. Our specific topic was object pronouns. With the lesson plan we determined our desired class and with our material we provided a variety of exercises for students. The lesson plan is created with a view of the ASSURE model lesson plan. The material also includes instructions for using CorpusData-COCA. We made sure it was easy enough for our students to understand how it works.

You can see the actual documents by clicking here.

Thank you for reading. With the instructions in the material, maybe you can use CorpusData and explore the world of authentic materials too :) .