Sharon Hartle: SKeLL as a Key to Unlock Exam Preparation

[Heike Philp]

Recording (21min): http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/p3lgecco8p2/

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.