Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Fishead soup]

This is one the latest buzzwords floating around. I believe it refers to making a list of the many different usages of words. This has become a big trend with Korean Educators. Despite the fact they tend to enjoy the theory with no intention of ever implimenting it.

There's programs on the net in which you can choose specific words and generate a huge list of sentences that demonstrates examples of that word.

[bassexpander]

It's just the latest thing being pushed by a book selling company trying to sell their books.

If you read something interesting in there that you'd like to share with your students, then go ahead. Otherwise, ignore it.

Koreans are easily suckered into buying stuff like this.

[Whistleblower]

Corpus or Corpora is pretty good for those teachers that would like to develop material based upon particular areas of interest. There is a textbook from Cambridge Uni. Press which is pretty interesting for those involved with Curriculum Development.

Click here for more information about Corpus in the Classroom textbook.

As for students, they don't know too much about this topic but as teachers we could incorporate Corpus with lessons.

[melirae1976]

I agree Whistleblower!

Corpus is not so much for making lists of words, but for identifying natural usage of words. I have used it with students before in the context of showing them how certain vocabulary occurs in natural language rather than relying on texts written specifically for ESL/EFL students that are a bit stilted in the language that they use.

Another advantage of it is for teaching grammar. There's a great reference book, Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, that is based on corpus. It shows the distribution of grammatical features among 4 different registers. If you were teaching a particular register, for example conversation, you could choose to focus on the grammatical features that are most prominent in that register rather than spending time on teaching grammatical structures that don't occur that frequently.

[Thiuda]

[Thiuda]

[branchsnapper]

Bassexpander has made some more clued-up posts, that is for sure. As I argued here a while back though, if he is speaking in reference to the "Touchstone" series he has a point.