How to improve students' writing performance with the corpora? (1)

 Hello, everyone! Your lovely BP is back! 👻👻

Last week, I displayed how to utilize Vocabprofilers by Lexical Tutor to improve students' vocabulary richness in compositions. This week, I want to introduce the other powerful platform, Sketch Engine. It contains 600 ready-to-use corpora in 90+ languages for the users to explore how language works, especially for concordance. 

Here is the link to Sketch Engine: 

https://app.sketchengine.eu/#dashboardcorpname=preloaded%2Fbnc2_tt21

The interface design is clear and friendly to beginners, and teachers do not need to build up very professional knowledge for corpora. So do not worry about technology issues! You will find it simple through this blog. The following is the homepage of Sketch Engine. 

Now let's begin! ✌✌

Step 1 Choose an appropriate corpus 

Choose an appropriate corpus for your students in the following area. In this blog I choose British National Corpus (BNC) as an example for its authentic English.

If you are not sure about the corpus you choose, click on the "CORPUS INFO". Sketch Engine provides a detailed description of each corpus as following.

Step 2 Intro to dashboard

2.1 Word Sketch

Word Sketch offers information of collocations and combinations. Click on the button, type in "knowledge", then click on "go", we can obtain the full range of collocations of "knowledge".

If we want to check the specific contexts "knowledge +gain" are used, click on the three dots and choose the first option as follows. Then we get all the concordance of "knowledge+gain". In this way, students are motivated to check their own compositions for more natural language use.

Teachers can choose to download concordances that they think useful for students and present them in their lesson slides. 
Notice: PDF file is recommended.

2.2 Concordance

Sometimes we want to check if native speakers have the expression of, say, trigger discussion. We can directly go to the concordance module.

Type in "trigger discussion", and we get the results. This collocation is rarely used, indicating some other more appropriate collocations.

In this case, we can turn to Word Sketch. The following is the search results, from which we can know that "stimulate the discussion", "provoke the discussion", or "initiate the discussion" are more frequently used.

That's all for today's blog. Unnatural concordance is common to see in L2 writing. So as English teachers, we are responsible to give our students enough input on common usage and collocations. That is also the pedagogical value of the corpus.

In the next blog, I will introduce another two modules on the dashboard (Word Sketch Difference and Thesaurus). See you next week!

If you still have some questions for how to use Sketch Engine, this video might be of help to you.

In case of any insert error, here is the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4eszLB47Qk

Again, any of your comment is welcome!👂👂