ONLINE CORPUS SYMPOSIUM with Leo Selivan

Symposium Moderation: Leo Selivan

Leo Selivan was lucky to start his teaching career with the British Council in Tel Aviv where he taught adult and teen learners before moving into teacher training. As teacher trainer, he conducted workshops for teachers in Israel, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Italy and other countries in the region. He also developed courses and wrote materials for the TeachingEnglish website. Today, Leo is a freelance lecturer giving courses to pre- and in-service teachers in ELT methodology, vocabulary teaching and second language acquisition. He maintains a blog called Leoxicon.

Jennie Wright

Making trouble-free tasks with corpora

For learners who repeatedly misuse specific vocabulary and grammar, using a corpus (electronic multi-million word collections of real-world language examples) significantly enhances accuracy and competence. Accessible to everyone, with masses of free material to exploit, session participants will leave knowing how to quickly and easily use corpora to design activities that take less than ten minutes to create.

Jennie Wright is a teacher, blogger and author currently based in Germany. With over 15 years of experience, her blog http://teflhelperblog.wordpress.com/ features free professional development resources for teachers. She also co-authored Experimental Practice in ELT: Walk on the wild side which is published by www.the-round.com.

Recording (28min):

http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/p2s18o3lv1t/

Sharon Hartle

SKeLL as a Key to Unlock Exam Preparation

One online tool which my undergraduate learners find invaluable is SkeLL, which has been freely developed by Sketch Engine to help English Language Learners. It is a highly versatile tool, which can be used to explore register, various aspects of lexical grammar among other things and provides a series of differentiated examples from the Sketch Engine corpus to illutrate usage. In this presentation I will focus on B2 level learners who are preparing for the “Use of English” section of their university language exam at the University of Verona. In my experience, it is generally advisable to scaffold the work with these learners, introducing different features gradually so as not to overwhelm them. In this presentation, therefore, I aim to show how the use of SkeLL can be integrated practically into an exam preparation lesson, helping these learners to become more independent as they explore collocations and verb patterns in SkeLL.

Although She is originally from Yorkshire, UK, Sharon Hartle has lived in Germany and Spain and she currently lives in Verona in the north of Italy. She works mainly at the universities of Verona and Bolzano, where she teaches general English and ESL. She is involved in teacher training, mainly INSET in schools and universities combined with some work on the Celta course. She is also very interested in Corpus Linguistics and language as discourse and, of course, elearning which, she says, over the past few years has effectively transformed the way she works.

Recording (21min):

http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/p3lgecco8p2/

Mura Nava

Darling (BYU) Wiki

Use the BYU-Wikipedia corpus to recycle coursebook vocabulary. This session will show participants how to recycle vocabulary from coursebooks by collating texts from wikipedia articles. The author will use an example of recycling vocabulary from a TOEIC coursebook. The talk will assume attendees have a little familiarity with searching on the the BYU corpora interface. Participants will also learn briefly some principles from SLA to help with designing worksheets.

Mura Nava has worked in ELT for 10 years in France. Before that he had experience of teaching Psychology at university level in the UK.

Recording (19min):

http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/p7a0zkkbqbg/

Question and Answer Round

Recording (19min):

http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/p5oyh6x9h9y/