A language corpus for students

The current generation of college students grew up with computers and internet, and most of them now own smartphones or iPads. You don't really need to tell them anything about how to find information because Google and Wikipedia are their best friends. (Vetting the information for use is another issue, but that's for a later post.) Sometimes though, language questions cannot be answered with a Google search or by glancing at a Wikipedia article: How is this word or phrase used? How common is this word or phrase? Which of two/three words or phrases is more common in this situation? For these and other questions, one needs to use a language corpus and my favorite is the COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English which is a collection of spoken and written material from 1990 till now with over 425 million words. It's generally used for academic purposes, but I like to introduce it to my students and show the power of this tool for them as English learners.

Linking words refresher exercise

My students are preparing for their presentations and I wanted to refresh their knowledge of various linking words, also known as connectors or transitional words and phrases. Usually, these appear in the books as a list or table sorted by type of connection. I decided to make it more interactive by having them sort these linking words, put them into gapped sentences and create an exercise with them.

Word matching classroom game

Of course, you can divide students into groups by telling them to form groups or by counting them off and letting the 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. work together. But it's more fun to give them a small task to find their partner(s). An easy way is to cut up a picture and have them find each other by matching the pieces, but I teach a language and to adults, so I wanted something more interesting.

My first idea was to cut up English words and hand those out, so they could find their partners. As I was preparing this, I noticed I could play with it even more by adding pairings that would work in the students' native language (Dutch), basically to confuse them a little bit more. After an hour or so of puzzling, googling, and using the American corpus for inspiration, I came up with a full circle of words that form correct English words when read one way and correct Dutch words when read another way. Here's the list:

Britain vs. America game

So, how to discuss the differences between British (BrE) and American English (AmE)? Some of them are simple spelling issues like -ise/ize, -re/er, or -our/or, but there are vocabulary differences as well. These usually come in the form of lists to memorize: boring!

Instead of going over the list in the book, I decided to make a game out of it.