Classroom Activities

Word Engineers

These activities can be turned into quite competitive games that have a fun touch to them, so you might try out a few of these examples:

1. Let the pupils guess the top collocates of a word.
2. Have the class guess the top suffixes of a word.
(for more ideas: https://www.etprofessional.com/5-ways-to-use-the-corpora-for-classroom-activities)

The corpus queries needed to check the results (and distribute points, e.g. for top collocates, very seldom suffixations etc.) can be performed by the teacher / the students. For (1), a collocates function is needed; (2) uses the list function and wild cards such as *like* for finding prefixations / suffixations of a certain root.

What’s the
difference

These activities require a bit more knowledge since the pupils need to find out the differences between near synonyms using concordances (i.e. the keywords-in-context function). Two example tasks are:

1. What is the difference between big, tall and large?
2. What is the difference between small, short and little?

Teachers may wish to show students how to specify the query. For (1) and (2) above, listing nouns following the search word in first position only would help students tremendously in finding their way through the results. Scaffolding, e.g. in form of prepared charts, suggestions for categories etc., may be very useful in many learner groups.

Pimp your style

The activities encourage students to find new words, e.g. in order to improve their variability in style in writing activities Examples are:

1. Look into the COCA in order to find synonyms for the word good since it is often used very redundantly.
2. List words from the COCA which you could use to describe the villain (nouns and adjectives) in an interesting, maybe even spooky way.
3. Search a corpus of your choice for words that can be used to link sentences.

Odd one out

These tasks also help differentiating similar words. Pupils receive a short list of words which all appear to share a connection. One of these words, though, is a „false friend“ or simply does not belong with the others. Pupils could also come up with word lists themselves and challenge another group in the next step. General examples of those word lists are:

1. Find the one word that does not fit : pretty, handsome, sophisticated, beautiful, stunning.
2. Find the „odd one out“: dark, sinister, malevolent, splendid, doomful.

Corpus queries can be used (e.g. keywords-in-context) to find out about the words‘ meanings. Of course, online dictionaries / thesauri can be used here, too.

Language
Explorers

Students turn into language explorers, describing patterns of language use. These tasks are suitable for advanced classes (e.g. approaching their A-levels). A few examples are:

1. Examine the distribution of neither in the English language.
2. Examine the use of the verb stop in two different contexts: stop + gerund vs. stop + infinitive.
3.  Examine the use of gonna in spoken/colloquial American English.