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
Transcript
MAGGIE CHARLES
I think the first thing to say is that perhaps the most important feature of anybody accessing the corpus for the first time is that it will always show you something surprising. So I say to the students right from the very beginning, you are going to be surprised, and I am also constantly surprised by what the corpora throw up. So you have to expect the unexpected.
Shout out if you get something different. If you’re not in agreement. Chaltis?
CHALTIS
In natural sentences we usually use ‘we’ because you need to give a bit of a certain authority that agree with the result that you present. And it’s not your decision to just show it or something.
MAGGIE CHARLES
OK. Absolutely. In essence, academic writing, you don’t want to be alone. OK? Being alone is really not a good place to be. And so you recruit this shadowy army, if you like, of people who are willing to go along with your argument with whatever you are doing.
So I think when you’re teaching students with English as an additional language, then one of the issues that they have is to express themselves in a way that is normal or conventional or acceptable within their own academic context.
Advanced students have problems to actually make their writing sound natural. And what the corpus then does for them is to give them a lot of examples which enable them to see that there are repeated patterns in language which they can then learn and transfer to their own writing. So I think that that’s particularly valuable for English as additional language. Although I would also say it wouldn’t really matter whether it was French or German; access to a corpus is something that I think all language learners should be made aware of.
As you watch the video, answer the questions below.
- What does Maggie say first about using corpora?
- How does using a corpus help students with English as an additional language?
Discussion
- 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’.
- 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.