A Corpus Course for EAP Teachers
Our corpus course for teachers is an online programme designed to help EAP teachers develop a great
practical understanding of how to use a range of corpus web tools with their students
10 weeks
This is a fully online course which you can take at your own pace. Study during the week when it is convenient for you
5-6 hours a week
You can fit your study around your teaching and other duties
Practical syllabus
The focus of this course is on developing practical corpus knowledge to use with your students immediately
Interactive
Through forums, interactive content and drop-in sessions with the tutors, you’ll feel part of a learning community
Testimonials
FAQs about the course
Many EAP teachers recognise the value of using corpus data in the classroom, the idea of accessing accurate information about how language is actually used in academic settings is very attractive. But the digital tools that we use to access them can often be confusing and packed with jargon.
If you’ve ever felt your enthusiasm or interest in corpus data wane when confronted with these tools, this course might be for you.
The course is 10 weeks’ long and the course modules are released on a Monday at 10.00 (UK time)
We estimate around 5-6 hours a week. We understand that you have busy working lives and we don’t want to pile too much on top of that. We also hope that it integrates well with your teaching, so some of those hours are a natural part of what you do anyhow.
No, you don’t. The course is very much designed for you to be able to fit it around your work and home demands. In weeks 3 and 6 of the course we offer some optional drop in sessions via Zoom if you wish to chat with a tutor or ask a specific question you might have about corpus tools. We can’t really make these a required part of the course because participants are spread out across different time zones and it’s not always possible to find a time that suits everyone.
We primarily view this as a CPD (continuing professional development) so the goal is not to set unreasonable demands to achieve the certificate. Rather we want the course tasks to be genuinely helpful in developing your skills. There are a few expectations though that we believe will help both you and the course be successful, namely:
- You make reasonable contributions to the forum discussions throughout the course.
- You complete the 6 course units.
- You submit a short assignment at the end where you design 2 classroom activities for your students using corpus tools/materials.
- You are fully registered on the course and have completed payment (this doesn’t apply to those on free scholarship places)
Yes, assuming you complete all the criteria mentioned above.
In some form, yes. You will be given permanent access to a self-study version of the course containing most of the content and you will be able to access the course forum via a special group set up.
Course aims and syllabus
- Comfortably navigate and search using a range of corpus tools, but with a specific focus on Sketch Engine and the British Academic Written English corpus
- Generate, understand and extract patterns from concordance lines
- Create a word’s collocational profile Identify subtle differences in meaning between similar words (theory/concept, cause/affect) that students struggle with
- Create lists of frequent words and lexical chunks
- Generate concordance lines that show specific syntactic/grammatical patterns
- Create engaging corpus-based materials to use with your students in class
Topic: Corpus in the classroom
Description:
In this unit you’ll look at some real video examples of a teacher using corpus tools in the classroom and think about how we can apply them to our own context.
Topic: Concordancing
Description:
In this unit, you’ll look at a key reading on using corpus in the classroom and also explore the concordancing function in Sketch Engine.
Topic: Word Sketch
Description:
This unit focusses on one specific function within Sketch Engine, Word Sketch, a very powerful tool for helping to generate collocations and concordances around a single word. You’ll be asked to try out some activities with your class.
Topic: Word Sketch Difference
Description:
The fourth unit builds on some of the tasks you’ve been doing with students in the classroom and gets you to use the Word Sketch Difference tool to design a task for your students.
Topic: Concordancing revisited
Description:
In this unit, you’ll circle back on concordancing and look at two additional functions: frequency and n-grams. You’ll also have the chance to explore two other functions in Sketch Engine and also start to think about planning corpus tasks with your students.
Topic: Advanced corpus skills
Description:
This last unit is where we introduce some more advanced tools in Sketch Engine, specifically Corpus Query Language (CQL). This tool will allow you to refine your search to find exactly the information you want.
Scholarship course places
As part of our commitment to supporting teachers without the financial capacity to pay for the course, we offer 3-5 free scholarship places on each course we run.
Please note that these places are only available for teachers OUTSIDE the UK, USA, Australia and Canada and candidates are chosen based on their suitability and appropriacy for the course. If you wish to apply, please click the button below:
Course images
Apply for a course
Please complete the form below to send to our admin team. This is not a commitment to take the course, but our team will respond to any questions you might have and provide a link to the official application form.
