Creating a Corpus Based Task - Prepositions of Time

  Hello there!

First task of this semester was to create a language awareness task that would encourage students to use a corpus. This was a group project, so I once again collaborated with the brilliant friend of mine, Kaan. We chose our topic (prepositions of time) from the 65th page of the studentbook that our teacher provided to us, as it is a quite important and often confused with the prepositions of place.

Our goal was to encourage the students to search for and discover the rules of the language, rather than just rely on us (the teachers) to learn, as this task that was given to us was a part of Data-Driven Learning Approach.

After looking through all the corpora, we decided to use COCA corpus. Because unlike the other corpora (which were mainly for searching nouns) it allowed us to search for the specific uses of "in" "on" "at" that we were aiming to teach. After deciding that, we began creating our tasks.

We created four tasks in total, one where they would tick the correct box, one where they would choose the correct preposition of time, one where they would fill the blanks with the correct preposition, and finally, where they would complete the sentences that explained when to use which preposition of time, so that the students would come to the conclusion on their own at the end. We also added a "How to use COCA" part, as we had recommended that they use it in the first exercise.

In the end, this task was quite fun to do. I think it's a good idea to show students how to use a tool (in this case, a corpus) and then let them discover on their own. I don't see myself fully committing to Data-Driven Learning though, I believe that it's best if we let the students explore, but also give the teacher opportunities to lead the students in the right direction at times.

I'll see you in my next update!

Wear your masks and your seatbelts!