The other day I had a lesson with my TOEIC class at one of the universities I teach at and we were having a vocabulary review. I decided to check knowledge of collocations by using some collocation forks and have my students check things out using COCA.
That part of the lesson worked well; after getting the students used to productive use of the corpus and reducing the number of lines, all was good. Checking things like ‘take in’ they found that it has mainly visual or cognitive stimuli that collocates.
It might have looked like my students were having a faff about on their phones but if I don’t teach them how to use a corpus in lessons, they probably won’t be able to use it without guidance at home.
I have in the past used Twitter as a corpus with students but it doesn’t work very well to give concordances all the time.
If you are interested in working with COCA, you should definitely give Mura Nava‘s Cup of COCA posts out.
Checking Vocab KWIC-ly
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