Final assignment overview

Final assignment overview

What's happening in this topic?

Time to complete: approximately 45 mins

In this topic you’ll be given information about the final assignment you need to complete on the course. Please note that the 45 mins here is the suggested time for reading through this page and examining the example, not for completing the assignment.

For your final assignment, you are asked to design two tasks that demonstrate your ability to design teacher-controlled and student exploration tasks. Your understanding of these teaching/materials development approaches should be evident in:

  • the data you extracted from the corpus and used in the task (copy-pasted sentences, screenshots, links to search results, etc.)
  • the task instructions e.g. asking students to use a particular SketchEngine tool/function themselves.

You can develop two tasks: one that demonstrates a teacher controlled activity and one that gives students a chance to explore the corpus themselves to discover information. 

Tasks Focus
Task 1
Teacher controlled
Task 2
Student exploration

Teacher controlled

The teacher-controlled task should require students to examine data you prepared (i.e. searched for and incorporated) in order to complete the task e.g. gap-fill using clues from a concordance, guides examination of concordance lines, note-taking, multiple-choice, error correction, etc. In other words, students are not required to perform any kind of search on Sketch Engine themselves. Your data can either be on paper (copied & pasted in the tasks) or in a hyperlink (for students to click on).

Student exploration

On the other hand, the student exploration task should require students to search for and find data in order to complete the task. In other words, this is a hands-on task and your instructions/screenshots should guide students on how to use the particular SketchEngine function. Please note that you are not asked to produce a long guide on how to use the tool; 1-3 screenshots should be enough to help students understand how to use the particular tool/function. 

In addition, your tasks can either be for classroom use or self-study. In either case, don’t provide us with information about lesson stages, timings, S-T interactions, the limitations of online teaching, etc. Let the materials speak for themselves.

NOTE: 

For this assignment, you need to use Sketch Engine, not FLAX. You don’t have to demonstrate every possible tool or function in Sketch Engine. Just use the one(s) you feel most confident in and those that make more sense for the type of task. For further ideas on how to use Sketch Engine to create tasks, please revisit the guides and examine the tasks we created for you as well as any lesson ideas. In addition, you can go back to the readings or the forum for a bit of inspiration!

If you don’t know what topics to choose, here is a list of suggestions to help you. Some are very specific, and others a little broad for you to narrow down. 

You do not have to choose from this list if you have your own ideas.

  • Prepositional phrases with at, on, in
  • The use of summary nouns e.g. this issue, this assumption, this result, etc.
  • The use of 1st and 2nd person pronouns i.e. I, you, we
  • The grammar of noun phrases
  • Reporting verbs/structures in hard sciences (i.e. PS & LS)
  • Collocations of high-frequency verbs e.g. show, provide, become, etc.
  • Subject-verb agreement in the Simple Present
  • The structure “it + is + adjective + to/that…”
  • Prepositions in Methodology Recounts
  • Commonly confused pairs e.g. affect/effect, then/than, accept/except, etc.
  • The use of linking words/phrases in essays
  • Collocations of stance nouns e.g. fact, evidence, idea, belief, claim, etc.
  • Modal verbs in the passive
  • Disciplinary variations of the structure ‘the + noun + of’
  • The different meanings of the word ‘theory’
  • Identifying part of speech from the context

NOTE: Some grammar topics are not suitable for student exploration e.g. asking students to search for complex grammatical patterns themselves will require the use of Corpus Query Language (Unit 6), which we recommend only for teachers. CQL should only be used in teacher-controlled tasks.

Rationale

Provide a brief rationale (5-6 sentences) and make it specific to your students’ needs or the particular lesson/published materials you have in mind. If you have selected one of our suggestions, just tell us why you chose it. You don’t need to have any references to relevant literature.

Tasks

There is no word count for the task instructions/content, but if you are designing a paper-based task you might want to consider the amount of data e.g. 10 pages of concordance lines for one task can be overwhelming and somewhat impractical. A task with a hyperlink to the data does solve this problem as students can flick through all these pages, but you would still need to consider whether they really need to flick through, say, 1000 concordance lines to answer 3-4 questions. 

Answer key

Please include an answer key to your tasks; if a task requires the students’ own answers, you can provide a suggested answer that you would give to students as a model.

To help you get your head around the final assignment, we’ve created a couple of examples for you to look at below, complete with comments giving relevant explanations and clarifications. In your final assignment, you do not need to provide comments; the comments are here to help you see what we are looking for in this assignment.

In the final unit – unit 6 – there will be a special page where you can upload your assignment as Word or PDF or share via a link. 

The deadline is Sunday 17th April. This is set after the end of the course because we appreciate that this is a very busy time of year for most people and it might be difficult to write the assignment before the end of the course.