Corpus based material as a teaching resource

Ang, M. L. (2007). Using corpus-based materials as a teaching resource for the teaching of prepositions in a Singapore primary school (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://libris.nie.edu.sg/

Background

This study was motivated by the author’s strong interest in incorporating corpus-based material as a teaching resource for English.

Aims

This study investigated how effective the use of concordances from corpus-based materials was in teaching five prepositions (at, by, in, of, to) to primary school students. It also investigated how receptive the students were to corpus-based learning.

Sample

Forty Primary 4 students from a mixed ability class participated in this study.

Method

Prior to the intervention, all the students were exposed to concordances in two enrichment classes. The students were thereafter split into two groups. The control group learnt the prepositions with teaching slides while the experiment group learnt them by analysing concordances. Pre- and post-tests of a ‘fill in the gap’ nature were used to track improvement.

Findings

Within the experimental group, low-performing students saw greater improvement on average than high-performing students. Students who liked learning with concordances improved more than students who disliked it.

The interview showed that most of the students (59.4%) liked working with concordance lines, mostly because it helped them improve their English. They viewed concordance lines as particularly helpful in learning to complete cloze passages. However, a large percentage of the students (75%) found them difficult to use, citing reasons such as the incomplete sentences and difficult vocabulary and concepts found in the concordance lines.

Implications

As the use of concordance lines benefited the students, the author suggested that the lines should be sourced more selectively so exercises based on them would be more appealing to students.

Original article retrieved from NIE Digital Repository.