[Paul Middlemas]

Hello. I had a look at Task 2.

 

its purpose/learning objectives

• to introduce students to a wider range of more academic language for describing trends
• to introduce alternative verbs (rather than phrasal verbs) for reporting trends
•  to look at adverbs commonly used to describe changes in trends in more detail
•  to facilitate students’ noticing of the above through BAWE (?)

 

task instructions

• they seem clear and relevant context provided with the graph, making the task more meaningful. It could have been more motivating/clearer to quantify the number of verbs you expect students to brainstorm for Part B.
• it seems to follow a mini test-teach-test structure. I’m not sure what the task was, but could be an idea to provide students with further practice by giving them a few more graphs to describe.

 

layout

• It’s OK. But potentially some screenshots of the BAWE website highlighting the results might have been nice, perhaps increasing likelihood that students could later investigate this themselves…

 

corpus techniques used

• The information is presented to the students, which works well in terms of the objectives above. However, I think a kind of ‘discovery’ activity where students are required to seek out the information, rather than just presented with the language, could also work.
• Follow up lesson might also think about left context language? E.g. alternate ways to describe the rate