PACE Workshop: Incorporating Online Corpora and Concordances in the Foreign Language Classroom for Contextualized Vocabulary Acquisition

Friday, April 22, 2016
2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Bruininks Hall 131A

Online information (registration not required)

How do we effectively incorporate online corpora and concordances into intermediate and advanced language classes? How do we create concordance-based activities and assignments to enhance learners’ accurate and contextualized use of newly acquired vocabulary items? How do we provide feedback and facilitate in-class discussions to help students reach a better understanding of the accurate use of the new vocabulary? How can we introduce the concepts of collocation, colligation, semantic prosody, and register to our students, and how can we design vocabulary activities that are focused on these concepts? And how can we assess students’ ability to use the newly acquired vocabulary accurately?

In this interactive workshop, Dr. Nader Morkus, will guide us through an exploration of these questions. He will present a number of online concordances in different languages, discuss their various features, and will provide examples on how they can be effectively incorporated in intermediate and advanced language classes. He will share concordance-based activities and assignments he has developed for his classes and will provide a framework for creating concordance-based assignments and activities to enhance students’ acquisition of new vocabulary items. Participants will explore online concordances and will create sample activities based on these collections in order to begin the process of incorporating them in their language classes to enhance students’ accurate and contextualized use of newly acquired vocabulary.

This event is open to the university community and registration is not required. Please bring your own laptop to explore the concordances demonstrated and to create sample activities. Refreshments will be provided.

Presenter: Dr. Nader Morkus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Director of the Arabic Language Program.

The PACE Project is funded by a grant from The Language Flagship.