Enhancing students' lexical skills in writing with a corpus-based pedagogy

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 and area where corpus linguistics can fill the gap. Using corpus data allows teachers and students to study naturally occurring grammatical patterns, word usage and textual discourse. In addition, corpus-based teaching allows teachers to develop their hands-on activities that cater for students at different levels. 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 language learners.
Word knowledge and usage are more accessible through corpora than other traditional tools, such as dictionaries. This seminar will introduce some free online corpora to teachers and provide guidance on how to explore corpus data and discover authentic use of lexical patterns and collocations. Corpus-based vocabulary teaching/learning activities that aim to enhance the lexical skills of students at different levels in their writing will be showcased and unveiled. Copyright © 2018 Language Centre, HKBU.