Publication - Feedback from integrating corpus consultation in teaching Greek as mother tongue at school
PROJECTS

Feedback from integrating corpus consultation in teaching Greek as mother tongue at school

Research Area:  
    
Type:  
In Proceedings

 

Year: 2008
Authors: Maria Giagkou; Ioanna Antoniou-Kritikou
Book title: Proceedings of the 8th Teaching and Language Corpora Conference
Pages: 386-391
Address: Lisbon
Date: 3-6 July 2008
Abstract:
The current paper describes an attempt to introduce data-driven learning of Greek as mother tongue in the context of primary and secondary education. We will present a preliminary small-scale evaluation of corpus use and will record pupils’ feedback from their first hands-on corpora experience. Our investigation involved a total of 85 pupils and 3 teachers. The evaluation tools included questionnaires, aimed at depicting the pupils’ overall appreciation of the corpus-based activities they were engaged in, and the teachers’ reports. The results allow for an optimistic view of the potentials of corpus integration in L1 teaching contexts. Some of the arguments of the advocates of the use of corpora in language teaching can be attested through the results of this case study: the corpus did seem to promote collaborative learning; the pupils did inductively discover language norms by examining corpus evidence. A very promising result concerns the intention of future corpus use not only in the language classroom, but also in their homework. However, the limitations of using the corpus in primary and secondary education settings were also revealed: learning how to use the corpus and interpreting the results is a demanding task for non-expert users; it needs time to achieve a certain level of familiarization with the principles and methodological aspects of corpus linguistics.
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