Current Trends in Foreign Language Teaching: Emphasizing Communicative Language Teaching
This overview explores contemporary trends in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT), particularly focusing on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). It highlights the significance of authentic and contextualized language, learner autonomy, and language awareness. Additionally, the applications of corpora as tools for both teachers and learners are discussed, demonstrating how data-driven learning fosters engagement and improves language acquisition. Examples include identifying problematic areas for learners and enhancing teaching materials based on corpus findings.
Current Trends in Foreign Language Teaching: Emphasizing Communicative Language Teaching
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Presentation Transcript
Class 3 Corpora in language teaching
Current trends in FLT • Communicative Language Teaching • Trends within CLT • authentic language • contextualised language • focus on form • learner independence/autonomy • language awareness
Corpora in FLT • application 1 - a tool for teachers • application 2 - a tool for learners
Application 1 • More accurate description of language • frequency of words and grammatical features • meanings of words • extended units of meaning – phraseology • collocations • Identifying problematic areas for L2 learners (learner corpora) • Syllabus design (especially ESP courses) • Production of teaching materials • authentic examples • learners’ dictionaries
More accurate description of language • Information on word frequency in dictionaries example from Collins COBUILD Dictionary
More accurate description of language • Arrangment order of word meanings examples from Oxford and Longman Dictionaries
OALD 1974 core meaning first
LDCE 2003 • Look at the next slide. Notice which meaning is listed as the first one. Why?
The Academic Wordlist Here is a corpus-based list of words that are particularly frequent in academic English, irrespective of the discipline http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/academic/
This/that/these/those • The following slide shows how frequently determiners are used by two groups of Polish upper-intermediate (Comp2) and advanced (Comp4) learners of English as well as native-speaking expert writers – journalists (BNCWA). • Can you see any problems in the use of determiners by Polish learners of English?
The following two slides illustrate possible post-modification patterns of the determiner those. • Study the table. Can you see any differences in the post-modification patterns between Polsih learners of English and native expert writers?
Application 2 • Data-driven learning (Tim Johns, University of Birmingham)students consult a corpus • discovery learning • increases motivation and interest • the results are more lasting
DDL • Option A • the teacher sets the task and asks students to consult • pre-selected citations • unedited concordance lines • the teacher is more in control and knows what students will find
Option A • Presentation stage • looking for examples for a particular word/phrase/structure in a corpus • studying concordance lines to look for different meanings, collocations, colligations or translations (in the case of parallel corpora) • Practice stage • finding missing words in concordance lines
DDL • Option B • the student (together with the teacher) looks for an answer to a particular problem that has arisen from the student’s language use • more open-ended and unpredictable • Tim Johns’ Kibbitzershttp://lexically.net/TimJohns/index.html • MICASE Kibbitzershttp://micase.elicorpora.info/researchers/micase-kibbitzers
