Thursday, November 13
Today's Goals:
To practice speaking about current events; To practice using corpuses as
a vocabulary learning strategy; To practice small talk.
Agenda:
1. Practice speaking by doing headline chats
2. Practice using corpuses to answer vocabulary questions
3. Practice small talk & keeping the conversation going.
Activity #1 - Headline Chats
Instructions:
1. In pairs, look at today's front page headlines from The New York Times.
2. Discuss the following questions together:
Activity #2 - Using Corpora
1. What is a collocation? With a partner, create a list of five common collocations in English. Do you think these are difficult to learn? Why or why not?
2. We have discussed using "Google" to figure out collocations when writing. A more sophisticated version of this strategy is using "corpora", or formal, searchable compilations of English language. Two major online corpora:
The Corpus of Contemporary American English
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;page=simple
3. Open the Corpus of Contemporary American English on your computer. You can search for words and collocates, and select which types of English you would like to search, i.e. formal English only. The results will give you frequency counts for words and sample sentences from real sources.
4. Complete the worksheet using the corpus to help you.
5. Compare answers with someone from the other group.
6. Follow-up Discussion: With a partner, make a list of five other ways you could use a corpus search.
Agenda:
1. Practice speaking by doing headline chats
2. Practice using corpuses to answer vocabulary questions
3. Practice small talk & keeping the conversation going.
Activity #1 - Headline Chats
Instructions:
1. In pairs, look at today's front page headlines from The New York Times.
2. Discuss the following questions together:
- Which headlines are you confident you know about?
- Which ones do you maybe know about?
- Which ones are you unfamiliar with?
Activity #2 - Using Corpora
1. What is a collocation? With a partner, create a list of five common collocations in English. Do you think these are difficult to learn? Why or why not?
2. We have discussed using "Google" to figure out collocations when writing. A more sophisticated version of this strategy is using "corpora", or formal, searchable compilations of English language. Two major online corpora:
The Corpus of Contemporary American English
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;page=simple
3. Open the Corpus of Contemporary American English on your computer. You can search for words and collocates, and select which types of English you would like to search, i.e. formal English only. The results will give you frequency counts for words and sample sentences from real sources.
4. Complete the worksheet using the corpus to help you.
5. Compare answers with someone from the other group.
6. Follow-up Discussion: With a partner, make a list of five other ways you could use a corpus search.
strong_collocations_worksheet.docx | |
File Size: | 55 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Activity #3: Small Talk & Keeping the Conversation Going
1. What is "small talk"?
- When do we do it?
- What topics are appropriate?
- What strategies do you use when making small talk?
2. Read the sample conversations with your partner. What do you notice?
3. Matching exercise
4. Role-play
- Imagine you are coworkers who have only spoken a few times before.
- You are having lunch and need to make small talk.
- You can start with an opening question, but you cannot ask another opening question for 2 minutes. Keep the conversation going!
5. Follow-up
- Was this difficult? Why / why not?
- Will you use this strategy in the future? How? Where? When?
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ted_-_30_day_challenge_listening_worksheet.docx | |
File Size: | 649 kb |
File Type: | docx |