With limited instructional time, what vocabulary words warrant explicit attention? Which words will give your students the biggest bang for their buck? In this session, we’ll discuss how to leverage corpora (databases of written and/or spoken language created to analyze linguistic structures) and materials derived from them to level-up your vocabulary instruction. As adult educators, we can use these powerful tools to make purposeful, data-driven decisions about which vocabulary to teach and how to approach teaching them. Corpora allow us to go beyond teaching vocabulary that we subjectively “think are pretty common”.
In this session, we will:
- Discuss what corpora are, their history and development, and how they can be used as tools for informing classroom instruction.
- Get an introduction to how to access and utilize the basic functions of Corpus for Contemporary American English (COCA).
- Discover corpus-derived word frequency lists and discuss how to pick the best list for your instructional context.
- Examine ways to incorporate word frequency lists into classroom activities and practices.
