week3-1) Discussion Questions 3

1. Discuss the following terms:

•  DDL-Data Driven Learning (DDL) an approach to language learning whereby the learner gains insights into the language that he/she is learning by using concordance programs to locate authentic examples of language in use. In DDL the learning process is no longer based solely on the teacher's initiative, his/her choice of topics and materials and the explicit teaching of rules, but on the learner's own discovery of rules, principles and patterns of usage in the foreign language. In other words, learning is driven by authentic language data.
•  corpus/corpora  either just one text or a collection of texts.A corpus can also be just one student’s essay. How big a corpus one needs also depends on what it is to be used for.
•  concordance An alphabetical list of the words in a book or a set of books which also says where each word can be found and often how it is used.

2. How can you gather English corpus data? Give us specific sources.

 There are a lot of sources to gather English corpus data . The easily accessible source is online concordancers and corpora. In this article we can get some great websites to create a KWIC concordance. If you click this hyperlink Websites, , you can use one of the online concordancers and corpora very easily.

3. What kinds of benefits can we expect in using corpus in English class.

Concordances can help teachers of languages. Language teachers can provide activities and materials that conform with native speakers’ use of the language. Using corpus in English class will make another type of teacher-role than the most traditional one. Contrary to teaching with traditional textbooks, exercise books and grammars, the teacher will often discover that a particularly productive “question” or activity brings up material and linguistic facts that neither student nor teacher expected.



4. Discuss the corpus-based activities that English learners and teachers can use.

The teacher can generate exercises based on examples drawn from a variety of corpora, for example gap-filling exercises and tests. Also the teacher can use a concordancer to find examples of authentic usage to demonstrate features of vocabulary, typical collocations, a point of grammar or even the structure of a text. Students can work out rules of grammar or usage and lexical features for themselves by searching for key words in context.