Week 7: Would I use Data Driven Learning? (20 February 2008)

I found this week’s lecture extremely interesting and an eye-opener in many aspects. When I was trying to make sense of the assigned reading, Corpus Linguistics and Second Language Instruction, I looked up the word “corpus” in the Oxford dictionary. It was defined as – body, collection especially of writings on a specified subject or of materials for study; e.g. linguistics – a collection of examples of spoken and written language. I thought that was a fairly apt definition. Imagine my surprise, when during the course of the lecture, I realised how the dictionary was compiled and that it had gone unchallenged up until 1987! This did level some of the absolute trust I used to have in dictionaries. The irony is that this is the first time I had actually used a dictionary with regards to the readings.

To the question: would I use data driven learning and adapt it for my context? the answer is “yes!”

I found the Key Word in Context (KWIC) exercise in constructing a low tech concordance with the word “economic” very viable. Here the learners are used as resources as we generate examples that contain the key word. Thus data are from the learners. From the examples collected and the way they were presented, aspects of the word and its collocation became apparent. In this case, words used in connection with “economic” were inflation, forecast, impact, recession, etc. For starters, I would use a simpler word for my students.

The mid-tech activity of a Multiple Context Cloze (MCC) was quite engaging, and this is what we want to do – engage students in their learning. To find the key word as the cloze sentences unfold requires hypothesising and activating prior knowledge. It encouraged rethinking of hypothesis and revisiting context, development of inference skills, and will lead to deeper understanding of the word and its usage in different contexts. There will also be self-correction if and when grammatical errors occur.