Publication details
Teacher Trainees Create and Exploit a Graded Reader Corpus
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Trainees are MA students in a Faculty of Arts teacher training program. In Spring 2014, their courses in “Linguistics for Language Teachers” ran in parallel with "Syllabus, Lesson and Material Design for ELT". The pre-service teachers are mostly familiar as their undergraduate program offers courses that revolve around corpora. Further training was available through worksheets taken from Discovering English with Sketch Engine (Thomas 2015). We use Sketch Engine to create corpora and for linguistic analysis. Working in small groups, each chose a graded reader, scanned it and added it to an existing corpus of graded readers. The trainees used our concordancing software to search their texts for examples of a wide range of language features that they will soon be teaching. They made a subcorpus of books at the same GR Level. Using a "hierarchy of language" framework for linguistic searches, the trainees located examples at the levels of morphology, word usage, functional phrases, word templates, aspects of sentence structure. These include various MWUs. The trainees made some discourse level findings and were also able to search for syntagms that instantiate tense/aspect usage in their subcorpora. The trainees also observed “topic trails” that appeared either across a whole graded reader or in selected sections. They were then required to present their findings in a Moodle course. The trainees had not used it for creating teaching-learning materials. In addition to the specific linguistic features that they derived from corpora, the graded reader corpus was also exploited for literary and cultural purposes. Trainees then developed their work into lessons that they will pilot on students whom they will teach in our Internal Teaching Practice. Groups of trainees teach a one semester course with c. 12 students in it. They have developed original teaching material that they will adapt to meet the needs of the students whom they are about to meet. |