Developing Corpus-Based Teaching Materials

 The first stage involved familiarizing myself with corpus linguistics principles, tools, and applications. I explored corpora the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)  to understand their structure and functionality. I also engaged with concordance tools to analyze patterns, including collocations, frequency, and context-specific language usage.

 I wanted to use collocations involving “make” and “do,” as these are commonly misused by learners. This phase demanded careful filtering of the vast data available, ensuring examples were not only relevant but also pedagogically appropriate.Using insights from the corpus, I created exercises that integrated real-world usage patterns. Activities included fill-in-the-blank tasks, matching. Each task was designed to promote both linguistic accuracy and communicative competence.

Also, another point of the corpus-based teaching is the sheer volume of data within a corpus posed challenge. While the richness of examples was valuable, narrowing down the information to what was most relevant for teaching objectives was a time-intensive process. Despite the challenges, the process of developing and implementing corpus-based materials proved to be a valuable professional development experience. In conclusıon, It was a different experince for me. I can think to integrate this approach in my next class.