Hello again everyone,
I hope
you are all doing fine. After a long break, here I am with new tasks to finish
and write about. So, I spent my last two weeks preparing what is called a
Language Awareness Task with my dear friend Cansu. Before talking about the
task itself, I should probably explain a few terms.
To begin
with, this task is part of a grander approach to foreign language learning
called Data-Driven Learning, in which students are not only listening to a
teacher but actively searching and discovering the rules of the language they
are learning. Students do their research by using corpora, which are tools used
by linguists for a multitude of purposes.
The topic of
our task is prepositions of time. We selected this topic as these prepositions;
in, on and at to be precise, are often not used correctly. In addition to being
prepositions of time, they are also used as prepositions of place, hence the
confusion. You should also keep in mind that in, on and at aren’t the only
prepositions of time but the coursebook given to us only included them probably
because they are the most commonly used ones. As described, this is a Language
Awareness Task so the use of corpora was encouraged. The corpus we chose is the
Corpus of Contemporary American English. This corpus provides more concordances
and it is better at searching prepositions. It may seem difficult to use but
young learners, being digital natives, won’t have any difficulty after one or
two tries.
To conclude, my view regarding DDL is... complicated. It’s a very unique method for me. It’s also incomplete, if I ever teach using DDL I will also be learning and discovering new things with my students.
This is
all for today, stay safe and goodbye.
Edit: You can view the task in Canva as well.
