Group items tagged

consciousness-raising (CR) – the common ground being that activities are structured in such a way as to invite learners to develop their own hypotheses about the targeted feature of the language.

know whether inductive (or data-driven) learning has an advantage over deductive (or rule-driven) learning. Reviewing the research Ellis (2008), concludes that “a tentative general conclusion might be that deductive FFI [form-focused instruction] is more effective than inductive FFI (when both involve practice activities) but it is possible that this may in part depend on the learner’s preferred learning style” (p. 882). 

In Ellis (2002) he states that “a discovery-based approach to teaching explicit knowledge has much to recommend it” (p. 164). One reason is that, arguably, a rule that has been ‘discovered’ is more memorable than one that has simply been presented.

Talking about grammar might be more meaningful than talking about the kinds of general topics often found in communicative language courses” (p. 165)

Scrivener (2005) advises teachers that “guided discovery is demanding on both you and the learner, and although it may look artless to a casual observer, it isn’t enough to throw a task at the learners, let them do it and then move on. Guided discovery requires imagination and flexibility” (p. 268).

anguage corpora are collections of authentic written and spoken texts, created in genuine communicative situations, and provide us with many real contexts.

Corpora allow students to see many examples of the word, phrase, or grammatical structure at the same time. They also notice patterns of usage and work out rules for themselves, and therefore remember them better.

for English there are the British National Corpus, and the COBUILD Bank of English corpus. It is also fairly easy to collect smaller corpora oneself, from texts available on the World Wide W

Only two such facilities will be covered here: frequency and concordance