7. Discourse

Corpora for teaching discourse

Activity 1

Meeting new people

Is the greeting form How do you do still used in English? In what contexts is it used? What are other forms of greeting have replaced ‘How to you do?’

Use The BNC Spoken Part to answer these questions.

Activity 2

Hedging in Spoken Academic Language

This activity demonstrates another application of corpora for teaching. Instead of making students consult the corpus, the teacher uses this database to develop educational materials. This activity comes from the MICASE webpage (http://micase.elicorpora.info/), ESL/EAP Teaching materials

Follow the activities in this handout. Note how the corpus was used to prepare them.
http://micase.elicorpora.info/files/0000/0075/Teach-_Hedges_PDF.pdf

Activity 3

Clarifying and confirming

This is another activity which demonstrates ho corpora can be used for preparing educational materials. This activity comes from the MICASE webpage (http://micase.elicorpora.info/), ESL self-study Activities

Follow the activities in this handout. Note how the corpus was used to prepare them.
http://micase.elicorpora.info/esl/clarifying/Intro.htm

Activity 4

Over to you

This time you are asked to prepare your own teaching materials you could use for teaching your students. Polish speakers of English frequently have problems using two discourse markers: of course and certainly and in consequence they often seem a little impolite. Are you familiar with this problem? Can you prepare a handout which will explain the difference between these two adverbs, and will give students opportunities for practice?

Work in pairs. You can use any resources available, not only corpora. You can prepare a few activities, some may involve working with corpus data (but remember it does not mean the students have to search corpora on their own).

Prepare a handout and submit it through Moodle.