Corpus Pocus???


   Hello, every being with a heartbeat! How are you holding up? I'm great, and I hope your life has been great as well.
 
    This post is going to be about group work I've done with one of my best friends, Meryem Kılıç (you should go and check her blog as well). We were assigned to create "Corpus-based material" for English teaching. It doesn't ring any bells, right? Let me explain.

    The definition of corpus, according to Merriam-Webster, is "all the writings or works of a particular kind or on a particular subject" and "a collection or body of knowledge or evidence." The corpus my friend and I used is of the latter, and it helps one find pieces of media, literature, or any other written text that exists online and has what you need in them. More simply, it is a search engine that helps you find what you are looking for. The corpus we chose was SKELL due to its adaptability to different students and non-complex nature.
 
    Our target audience is intermediate-level 9th-grade students who share an L1 (Turkish). They probably have already learned these, but it can be quite hard for them to become cemented. Thus, this activity will help them fully acquire this information and never forget or mix it up.
 
    After studying the material we've created, our students will be able to:
  • understand the differences between the words me, my, and mine,
  • use them in their appropriate place,
  • identify the words and use them accordingly,
  • pick the correct one to place in their sentences.

    Here is the link to our corpus-based material. Hope you like it :) 

    Thank you for reading this post and see you in the next one, every being with a heartbeat.



PS:😟Unfortunately, there is an affordance to this material, which is that it requires technological devices. One cannot predict the accessibility of their students to technological devices and the internet, or their school might not have access to the internet or the devices, like a smartboard or a computer room, that would be necessary for this material to be used. Thus, this must be taken into consideration beforehand.