◄Previous: 3 First-person pronouns

4 Assisting EAL students

Now watch a video of Maggie’s class, intercut with Maggie explaining how she teaches using corpora.

Activity 2 Using corpora in the EAP classroom

Allow about 15 minutes
Transcript (opens in new window)

As you watch the video, answer the questions below.

  1. What does Maggie say first about using corpora?
  2. How does using a corpus help students with English as an additional language?
(A text entry box would appear here, but your browser does not support it.)

Discussion

  1. The most important feature Maggie discusses is that a corpus will always show you something surprising. She says she is ‘constantly surprised by what the corpora throw up. So you have to expect the unexpected’.
  2. EAL students – as well as other students – have to learn how to express themselves in ways that are acceptable in their academic context and that sound natural. The corpus provides patterns and these help both EAL and other students.
◄Contents►Next: 5 Students’ views

OpenLearn - Language in professional life
ou logoCreative Commons non-commercial share alike icon Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.