Teaching Grammar - Week 10 - Communicative Tasks in Grammar Teaching

Introduction: Hello and welcome to Week 10 of the course Teaching Grammar for the Licenciatura in English Teaching at ULACIT. In this class we will do several activities to explore the topics of tasks in grammar teaching and the use of corpus data to help students make discoveries about language. 

Today's Goals:

• Explore one of three task gap types (information, opinion, and reasoning) and share the logic, strengths, and challenges of your assigned task type with your partners.
• Search corpus data to make discoveries about how words and phrases are actually used. 
• Begin sequencing your syllabus content for your Grammar Syllabus Proposal.

Guiding Questions:

• What are the features of a communicative task?
• What are the benefits of using tasks to develop students' ability to use grammar communicatively.
• How can corpus linguistics help us make discoveries about how language is actually used?

Task 1: Exploring Task Types

Click on your assigned link below to expore your task type. Be ready to explain what you learned to your partners when we return to the main room. 

• Group 1 - Information Gap Tasks - CLICK HERE
• Group 2 - Opinion Gap Tasks - CLICK HERE
• Group 3 - Reasoning Gap Tasks - CLICK HERE

Task 2: Using COCA

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is the world's largest collection of spoken and written English texts containing over a billion words. You can search the corpus to learn lots of interesting things about how words and phrases work. It's free, but you need an account. 

• Sign up: CLICK HERE or copy/paste this link into your internet browser. 
• https://www.english-corpora.org/register.asp?n=y

• Try it out: CLICK HERE or copy/paste the link into your internet browser to go to the search page. Type in your favorite English word or short phrase.
• https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/

• Options: Try using the following options to see what you can learn.
• Word: Definition, Topics, Collocates

Task 3: Using Corpus Data

Now you will continue working with COCA to complete some tasks with your partners. Click your group link below and follow the instructions.

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE

Task 4: Grammar Syllabus Proposal Project

Last week you worked with your partners to select CEFR can-do statements. From those statements you extracted specific communicative aims. Then you brainstormed specific grammar structures, useful phrases, and vocabulary words to achieve the aims as well as some possible learning activities for students.

Now it is time to put the pieces together. You need to arrange your course into 3 distinct units. Each with at least two communicative aims and all of the language points and suggested learning tasks. For homework you will write a brief paper describing your syllabus proposal and justifying the choices that you made when designing the course. Get started now!

• Assignment Guidelines: CLICK HERE

• Group 1: CLICK HERE
• Group 2: CLICK HERE