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Mohamed Almahdi
May 11, 2015
E 507

Reflective Essay
Corpus linguistics is really an interested field to study since it shows how languages are
used by native and non-native speakers. Furthermore, it is a field from which teachers can
develop activities for their classes. For my final project, I chose to develop five activities based
on (COCA) because I would like to find many ways to supplement my lessons with extra
activities and exercises. This can be done as I am reading some articles and websites about
classroom activities. I believe that doing the e-portfolio is beneficial for me since it makes me
develop activities that are needed in every day classes and apply what I have learned from this
class.
At the beginning of this semester, I did not know much about corpus linguistics, but,
now, I know a great deal about it. This can be seen in the activities that I have developed for this
class. For instance, I developed my first activity out of the concordance lines in COCA. It is a
beneficial activity for students since it recycles what students have learnt in the past in terms of
prepositions. The second activity has to do with positive, neutral, and negative connotations. It
aims to raise students awareness of the connotation of some adjectives that students have
encountered in their textbook. It provides learners with some examples and explanations about
connotations. For instance, the word smart has been italicized to attract students attention to
the fact that when a positive adjective such as smart used before the adjective thrifty, it
means that thrifty has a positive connotation. Therefore, I believe that students will learn a

great deal from this activity since learners will have the opportunity to work on language using
the concordance lines in COCA.
The third activity has to do with academic and non-academic words. Dealing with
students in class, I have noticed that students use non-academic words in their academic essays.
Therefore, I developed this activity to make students aware of the non-academic words they are
using such as good, bad, guy, a lot, get, and some others. The activity also aims to
make students avoid using the non-academic words by providing some recommendations at the
end of it. Students can use the chart option in COCA to look up words and decide which word in
each pairs is an academic word. By doing that, students are involved in discovering the words
instead of just providing them with a list of academic words.
The fourth activity is about transition words, students are given some explanations about
the categories of transition words that they should use in their essays. Then, they are asked to
look at the positions of some transition words in COCA using the concordance lines. I think this
activity is useful since it makes learners use the correct transition word in the correct position in
sentences. It also aims to make learners use the correct transition words for the correct purposes
that they should play in sentences.
The last activity has to do with discovering patterns. It suggests some words and phrases.
Students should learn how these words and phrases work using the concordance line in COCA.
For example, learners are asked to discover the difference between result in and result of. In
other words, when should we use of with result? Or when should we use in with result? This
activity can help leaner discover more patterns in the future following the same technique.

Having said some positive points about my activities, there are some negative points
about them. First, training is needed although COCA is easy to use in comparison with other
corpora. Students should be taught how to use COCA in previous levels and familiarize
themselves with it. Furthermore, I first developed my third activity from my own experience I
mean I first chose the non-academic words that I thought my students overuse in their writing
without referring to any sources to support my point. After developing it, I tried to provide some
sources and references online. Last but not least, I developed some activities for Face2Face
textbook, which is a British book, using COCA, which is an American corpus. Therefore, I
wonder if I chose the right corpus. However, I think that providing students with a variety of
Englishes is not terrible since English is becoming a global language and might have something
like Chinese English, Spanish English, or Arabic English. Moreover, some of the students will
go and study English in the USA.
For this reason, I would like to have a feedback from students by asking them to do some
assessments for the activities that they have done in the lab. If the feedback is positive, I will
develop new activities and follow the same technique. If the feedback is negative, then, I have to
change the technique I am using and think about plan B or C.
In Conclusion, I learnt a great deal from doing this electronic portfolio. I have created my
first website and developed my own activities using COCA. For me, this class is the most
enjoyable class in the TEFL/TESL program at CSU. Furthermore, I noticed that my performance
has developed during the course since I had just a general background about Corpus linguistic at
the beginning of the semester. Now, I know a great deal about corpus linguistic and hope to keep
developing more activities and even curricula using different corpora.

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