MOOC - Unit 4 Packet

Unit 4 Packet:
Technology for Teaching

Vocabulary and Grammar
Using Educational Technology in the English
Language Classroom
© 2018 by Iowa State University. Unit 4 Packet for the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and
administered by FHI 360. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, except where noted. To view a
copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Table of Contents
Overview ........................................................................................................................................ 3
Vocabulary and Technology .......................................................................................................... 5
Introduction to Vocabulary and Technology................................................................................. 6
Exploring Technology Tools for Vocabulary ................................................................................ 27
Discussion: Using Technology to Teach Vocabulary ................................................................... 29
Grammar and Technology ........................................................................................................... 30
Teaching Grammar Using Technology ......................................................................................... 31
Grammar Teaching Resources ............................................................................................. 47
Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English .......................................................... 48
COCA: The List Function ............................................................................................................. 49
COCA: The KWIC Function ......................................................................................................... 58
COCA: The Collocates Function (Part 1)..................................................................................... 63
COCA: The Collocates Function (Part 2)..................................................................................... 71
COCA: The Compare Function ................................................................................................... 76
COCA: The Chart Function ......................................................................................................... 81
Summary ............................................................................................................................ 86
This is a program of the U.S. Department of State administered

by FHI 360 and delivered by Iowa State University 2
Overview
"Completing a vocabulary and grammar activity using technology" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
In the previous unit, you found out about using technology to teach speaking and listening. In
this unit we will focus on teaching vocabulary and grammar with the help of technology.
Below are the tasks that you need to complete in this section with the recommended time as a
guide. These time guidelines are only approximate: you may find that you spend longer or
shorter on some tasks, depending on your experience with and interest in the topic.
Tasks:
Vocabulary & Technology
• Watch the lecture: Introduction to Vocabulary and Technology. (40 minutes)

• Complete the Introduction to Vocabulary and Technology follow-on quiz. (10 minutes)
• Explore some technological resources for teaching vocabulary that are accessible in your
country. (45 minutes)
• Participate in a discussion to share your experience teaching vocabulary and the technology
tools that you used. (30 minutes)
Grammar and Technology
• Watch the lecture: Teaching Grammar Using Technology. (45 minutes)

• Complete the Teaching Grammar Using Technology follow-on quiz. (15 minutes)

• Explore some technological resources for teaching grammar that are accessible in your
country. (40 minutes)
• Explore the functions in the Corpus of Contemporary American English for grammar
teaching. (30 minutes)
• Evaluate yourself in the Unit 4: Self-assessment quiz. (20 minutes)
• Read a summary of Unit 4. (10 minutes)

Vocabulary and Technology
"Students working with technology" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
The first topic in this unit will focus on teaching vocabulary using technology. Here you will be
introduced to some resources for teachers that allow for supplementary vocabulary instruction.
Goals:
After this section you will have...
• Met our vocabulary expert, Professor James Ranalli

• Learned about the connection between technology and vocabulary
• Learned about what teachers should know when teaching vocabulary
• Learned about Fanfiction, and how it can be used for vocabulary learning
• Learned about the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and how it can be used for
vocabulary learning

Introduction to Vocabulary and Technology
[The video can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlE2-

ekUHe82vQjRLrEz_bkqCsuLMTY4e ]
Slide 1. In this lecture, Professor Carol Chapelle will explain how technology is used
for teaching second language vocabulary.
Slide 2. In this Lecture. In this lecture we’ll start out by looking at the connection
between technology and vocabulary today. We’ll then meet our vocabulary expert
professor Jim Ranalli. I’m going to ask Jim why vocabulary is so important for Prof. Carol Chapelle
students to learn and then we’ll ask him what teachers should know about
"Professor Carol Chapelle"
vocabulary in order to teach it well. We’ll also ask him for some specific advice about by Iowa State University is
how to teach vocabulary and finally we’ll look at how technology can help our licensed under CC BY 4.0
students who are trying to learn second language vocabulary.
Slide 3. The technology-vocabulary connection.

There are many important connections between
technology and vocabulary today. Technology
provides access to many different ways for
students to study vocabulary. Also teachers can
find many resources to help teach vocabulary on
the Internet. Let’s take a look at vocabulary
teaching activities. The first one comes from
Voice of America’s section called “News Words”
and the second is the vocabulary that is in the
News Stories.
Slide 4. This page called News Words is one

example of vocabulary on the Voice of America
webpages. In this section the authors have taken Voice of America: News Words
words that are found in news stories and they
have created little mini lessons about each of the “News Words” by VoA Learning English. This content is copyrighted, and cannot be
adapted in any way, or distributed after the end of this course. It is not Public
words. For example, we see a number of words Domain or Creative Commons-licensed, and therefore not for public use. Please do
that students might find difficult in these new not save a copy for your personal use, and do not use it after the course ends.
stories.
Slide 5. One of the news stories was about the Ethiopian Olympic Gold Medal athlete. She won the Gold
Medal and as part of the story they talked about how she had “obliterated” previous records. So on the
website what’s highlighted is the word “obliterated.” This is probably a word that most students wouldn’t

know. But in this section it gives the students a chance to look at the word, see it in context, and also hear
it when they listen to the story.
Slide 6.
Watch the story at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EO9gzw7Qzc

“News Words: Obliterated” by VoA Learning English. This content is copyrighted, and cannot be adapted in any way,
or distributed after the end of this course. It is not Public Domain or Creative Commons-licensed, and therefore not
for public use. Please do not save a copy for your personal use, and do not use it after the course ends.
Slide 7. In another section of the Voice of America website we see the actual news stories. This is one
example of a story about the very historic meeting of our outgoing president Barak Obama with our new
incoming president Donald Trump. The title is “Changing Presidents Can Be a Very Stressful Process.”
“Changing Presidents…” story

“Changing Presidents Can Be a ‘Very Stressful Process’” by VoA Learning English. This content is copyrighted, and
cannot be adapted in any way, or distributed after the end of this course. It is not Public Domain or Creative
Commons-licensed, and therefore not for public use. Please do not save a copy for your personal use, and do not
use it after the course ends.

Slide 8. Under the story we can see a text that has a number of words that may also be good targets for
vocabulary learning. Some of the words are in bold, such as in the second sentence: the president elect’s
transition team now needs to choose who will work in his administration. The word “transition” is
highlighted meaning that that is a vocabulary word.
“Changing Presidents…” text

“Changing Presidents Can Be a ‘Very Stressful Process’” by VoA Learning English. This content is copyrighted, and cannot
be adapted in any way, or distributed after the end of this course. It is not Public Domain or Creative Commons-licensed,
and therefore not for public use. Please do not save a copy for your personal use, and do not use it after the course ends.
Slide 9. Following the story there is a list of those

words that were highlighted. Here “transition” is
listed and it’s defined as: “a change from one group
or state or condition to another.” Ok, so a change,
so the story is talking about a transition team. That
is a team that’s responsible for managing the Word definition
change.
“Changing Presidents Can Be a ‘Very Stressful Process’” by VoA
Learning English. This content is copyrighted, and cannot be
Slide 10. A good strategy for the student is to look at
adapted in any way, or distributed after the end of this course. It is
the definition; then look back at the news story to see not Public Domain or Creative Commons-licensed, and therefore
how it’s used in context. One of the things we want to not for public use. Please do not save a copy for your personal use,
and do not use it after the course ends.
teach when we teach vocabulary is how the words are
actually used in sentences.
Slide 11. Meet our vocabulary expert. So we’ve seen a couple of examples of the kinds of vocabulary
activities that we can find on the Internet. Let’s meet our vocabulary expert now: Professor Ranalli teaches
English at Iowa State University. He has taught English in Africa and South Korea and has also done

research to investigate how to teach vocabulary better by using technology. I asked Professor Ranalli how
he became interested in vocabulary and this is what he said.
Slide 12. My interest in second language vocabulary really started with my experience
as a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia in Southern Africa. Having been frustrated in my
efforts to learn a second language when I was in high school and college, I really wanted
to use my immersion experience living in a rural village, where very little English was
spoken and where my target language, which was called Oshiwambo, surrounded me,
to finally help me develop a strong communicative ability in a different language. For
Prof. Jim Ranalli me, the most challenging part of learning this new language seemed to be getting a
"Prof. Jim Ranalli" handle on the lexicon because this was a Bantu language that has very little in common
by Iowa State lexically with English, except for a fair number of loan words. Although I had pretty
University is licensed
under CC BY 4.0 good ability at pronouncing and discriminating the sounds of this new language and
reproducing the grammatical patterns of the language, my memory for vocabulary items wasn’t the best,
so I found myself putting a lot of effort and a lot of time into that aspect of my learning.
When I moved to South Korea and started working there and started trying to learn the Korean language,
I found a similar situation—a language very dissimilar to English whose vocabulary I basically had to start
learning from scratch. I really spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the very difficult, the very
daunting, task of second language vocabulary learning manageable for myself but also for my students.
Slide 13. Professor Ranalli tried to learn Oshiwambo when he was teaching English in Nambia and he really
had a hard time learning vocabulary. And then when he went to Korea he had the same problem; when
he tried Korean, again, he had problems remembering the vocabulary.
Slide 14. Vocabulary learning is the problem. Professor Ranalli started in California. He then went to
Africa, and then South Korea. Wherever he went the problem was the same: he had trouble learning
vocabulary.
This work is a derivative of "World Map" by One World – Nations Online. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360
for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

Slide 15. Meet our vocabulary expert. Based on Professor Ranalli’s experience, he wanted to find better
strategies for learning vocabulary--strategies that he could use himself as well as strategies that he could
use to help his students learn better.
Slide 16. But what are good strategies for learning vocabulary? Should students try to memorize words?
Should they read texts with words to learn? Do vocabulary drills help? Should they be learning more about
words? Professor Ranalli developed some technology tools to help students with strategies for learning
vocabulary.
Slide 17. Why vocabulary is important. I asked Professor Ranalli to tell us why he thinks that vocabulary
is so important for English learners to control. He said that we cannot say anything without vocabulary!
Let’s listen.
Slide 18. Vocabulary, in some ways, is the most important dimension of language that
learners need to master. There was a linguist called David Wilkins who famously said,
“Without grammar, little can be conveyed. Without vocabulary, nothing can be
conveyed.” I think that’s really true. Grammar helps us structure and refine and clarify
what we mean, but vocabulary really does the heavy lifting in terms of conveying
meaning. At the same time, vocabulary has traditionally been one of the most neglected
Prof. Jim Ranalli
areas of language instruction.
"Prof. Jim Ranalli"
by Iowa State As evidence, I can point to the curriculum in English as a second language that we have
University is licensed
under CC BY 4.0
here at Iowa State. We have courses in listening and reading and writing. In our intensive
English program, they teach courses in speaking and grammar. You can even find
specialty courses in pronunciation, but courses in vocabulary are very rare.
For some reason, it’s often considered acceptable to just assume that students will acquire the vocabulary
they need through exposure to the language, for example, through reading or through their own efforts
and intentional learning of vocabulary using notebooks or word cards or some strategy like that. The
problem with this assumption is that research shows learners really can’t get all the vocabulary they need
through incidental exposure. Learners also need to intentionally acquire new words as well, but the ways
they go about doing this may not be the most effective. Often, they have trouble selecting the most
appropriate words for learning, identifying those that will be most useful to them, and identifying which
aspects of new vocabulary they should focus on. Typically, they equate vocabulary learning with learning
the meanings of words, but there’s a lot of other information about words that they need in order to use
them well. Although it’s impossible to teach all the vocabulary that students will need in their classroom
because there’s just too much of it, we can’t neglect our duties as teachers with respect to vocabulary.
We need a principled approach to dealing with it in the classroom, and an important aspect of a principled
approach is giving students helpful strategies that they can use for learning and using new second
language vocabulary effectively.
Slide 19. Professor Ranalli pointed out that without grammar little can be conveyed. You can’t say much
without grammar but without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed. You can’t say anything without
vocabulary. Vocabulary holds the meaning. Vocabulary is the stuff we talk about, so it’s really important.

He also pointed out that historically vocabulary has been a neglected area in language instruction and he
pointed out that learners need instruction to learn vocabulary because they cannot learn all they need on
their own.
Slide 20. He also said that students have trouble leaning vocabulary on their own. It is difficult for them
to select the appropriate words to study, identify words they need, and understand what aspects of the
words they should be studying.
Slide 21. For Example. For example, let’s take a look at

the word “obliterated” that we saw earlier. In that
context the meaning was that the runner obliterated
the world record. And this means that she beat the
record so that it no longer existed. She obliterated the
record.
Slide 22. “Obliterated” means “beat” but how do

people use this word?
Slide 23. We need to see examples. We really need to

see examples if we’re going to understand how people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EO9gzw7Qzc
use the word “obliterated.” It’s used in lots of different “News Words: Obliterated” by VoA Learning English. This content
contexts besides “obliterating the world record.” In the is copyrighted, and cannot be adapted in any way, or distributed
illustration we see a number of examples of sentences after the end of this course. It is not Public Domain or Creative
Commons-licensed, and therefore not for public use. Please do
or parts of sentences where the word “obliterated” has not save a copy for your personal use, and do not use it after the
been used. The first one says, "the lecture model will course ends.
be obliterated in academic circles." And the second one says, “the camp’s complicated social hierarchy
was obliterated.” “They were waiting to descend the now obliterated ladder,” is the third one. Another
says, “By doing this, the Greenpeaceniks damaged or obliterated marks and drawings on the ground.”
There are lots and lots of contexts in which things are obliterated and they don’t always mean “beat.”

COCA output for the search for the word “obliterated”
This work is a derivative of "Search results for obliterated" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This
derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S.
Department of State.
Slide 24. COCA. Those examples of the word “obliterated” in many

different sentences came from the Corpus of Contemporary American
English or COCA, as we call it. We are going to use this Corpus more in this
course and learn more about it. We’ll also talk about how students can use
this resource to get examples for themselves. This is a large collection of
American English texts that are used for linguistic research. Because it is
available on the Internet you can use it, other teachers can use it, and so "Student browsing the internet"
can your students. by Iowa State University is licensed
under CC BY 4.0
Slide 25. What teachers should know. I asked
Professor Ranalli what teachers need to know about vocabulary. He pointed out
an important distinction between two ways of learning vocabulary. Let’s listen.
Slide 26. One really useful distinction for teachers to keep in mind is that between
incidental vocabulary learning and intentional vocabulary learning. Incidental
would be where our students pick up new words without meaning to through
reading or listening. Research suggests that a great deal of second language
vocabulary can be learned this way. That’s why we need to be doing things like
Prof. Jim Ranalli encouraging our learners to do a lot of reading outside of class—reading for
"Prof. Jim Ranalli" by Iowa pleasure, extensive reading--and also listening to English language radio programs
State University is licensed or English pop songs or English language movies or TV shows that provide some
under CC BY 4.0
form of comprehension support in terms of captions or subtitles or something like

that. These aids help them make connections between form and meaning and acquire new words
incidentally.
We can’t just rely on incidental learning. Our students won’t learn all the vocabulary they need that way.
They also need to be learning words intentionally which means making a deliberate effort to identify
words that’ll be useful to them and also doing things that’ll help those words stick in their memories so
that they’re available to be used later. Intentional learning can involve things like at the very beginning
stages studying vocabulary lists which are just high-frequency words in the target language listed next to
their equivalents in the student’s first language. This is a perfectly acceptable way of trying to learn
vocabulary in the beginning stages--trying to memorize these lists. Later in their careers, students can use
vocabulary notebooks or word cards or flashcards which are paper-based or nowadays, there are a lot of
terrific web-based flashcard tools that are free.
Incidental learning and intentional learning—that’s an important distinction. One more important word
that teachers want to remember is incremental. Vocabulary is learned incrementally. We have to
remember that it doesn’t all happen at one time. You don’t learn all you need to know about a word in
the single meeting with that word. We learn what we need to know through repeated exposures to words
in different contexts of use so that our knowledge builds up over time. It’s important in our teaching to
find opportunities to give students those repeated exposures, and when they have done so, to draw
students’ attention back to those words and to try and find new things about them that we can point out
to our students.
Slide 27. Professor Ranalli said that there are two ways of learning
vocabulary: incidental vocabulary learning and intentional
vocabulary learning. Incidental vocabulary learning occurs when
students are working together in conversation or reading and
their focus is on what they are talking about or what they’re
reading about. The vocabulary may just be in the background.
They may be using it, they may not know it, and they may be
picking it up without really realizing it: they learn it incidentally.
"Students studying using a laptop" by Iowa State
In contrast, students can engage in intentional vocabulary University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
learning, meaning that they are focusing on the words. They are
there to look at the words; they are there to study the words and
they know that they’re trying to learn particular words. This
activity is intentional. Professor Ranalli points out that both of
these processes are very important for students to learn enough
vocabulary.

Slide 28. Students learn intentionally when they work on a vocabulary lesson. The Internet has lots and
lots of opportunities to find vocabulary for students to learn intentionally. They learn incidentally when
they participate in fun, interesting language-rich activities in English. And again the Internet is a great
source for these. One type of activity is called “fanfiction” and we’re going to call on one of our experts,
Shannon Sauro, to introduce to you what students can do when they work in fanfiction, such as fiction
about Sherlock Holmes, the novel.
Slide 29. Fan practices and vocabulary learning. Hello. This is Shannon Sauro. In this
segment, I’ll introduce you to the concepts of fans, fandom, fanfiction, and other
fan practices for language learning. Then, I'll share research on a particularly
successful second language user of English who entered fandom with the deliberate
goal of developing her English, including her vocabulary, but first, it’s necessary to
provide the background on some key terms. I’ll start with “fans.”
Prof. Shannon Sauro Slide 30. When I talk about “fans” and “fandom,” I’m often
"Prof. Shannon Sauro" by asked what it means to be a fan. Fan studies, a subfield of
Shannon Sauro is licensed cultural studies, provides a good source of definitions. Here’s
under CC BY 4.0
one I particularly like: “The term ‘fan’ now covers a wide range
of ordinary people who [have] a positive emotional engagement with popular culture.
That engagement may take the form of connection with the text, image, performance
or creative signature of a public figure. It might include love for a particular cultural
form or genre.”
Slide 31. In his excellent ethnography about “fans” of the songwriter and singer Bruce
Springsteen in the late 1990s, Cavicchi provides another definition that highlights the
cultural component of being a fan, which “is actually a much wider social category, Bruce Springsteen
referring to a mode of participation with a long history in a variety of cultural "Bruce Springsteen on the
activities, including literature, sports, theater, film, and television.” screen" by Sake Jager is licensed
under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Slide 32. Culture. In both definitions, there’s reference to culture which many might think of as the food,
clothes, and traditions a society has, but a more nuanced definition of culture also recognizes “the ideas,
customs, skills, [art] and tools that characterize a given group of people in a given period of time.” Culture
therefore includes high art as well as popular art and media, and the equipment and places associated
with sports, for example. By extension, it therefore includes the vocabulary needed to talk about these
things. This broader definition also recognizes that culture can belong to groups of people and not just
whole societies. This includes communities of fans.
Slide 33. Online fandom. Fans have been

around long before the Internet, but Web 2.0
technologies, including many social media
sites, have helped lead to the growth of online
communities of fans known as fandoms.
Online fandoms, therefore, are “the local and
international networks of fans that develop
around a particular program, text or other
media product and which foster the sharing of
responses to the source material, including
the production of novel fan-generated
content.”
Slide 34. Within these online fandoms, fans

engage in a great deal of interaction and many Archive of Our Own
different, often creative fan practices, perhaps This work is a derivative of "Archive of Our Own" by Archive of Our Own. This
the best known of which is fanfiction, also derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher
Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
defined as “writing that continues, interrupts,
reimagines, or just riffs on stories and characters other people have already
written about.” However, fanfiction is only one of the social media practices
that engage learners and therefore, expose them to new vocabulary. In this
study of a fan, we’ll see other fan practices that also lead to vocabulary
learning.
Slide 35. Case study of Steevee. The purpose of this case study was to
explore the L2 language development and digital literacy practices of an
adult fan and second language learner of English. It consisted of a series of
structured and semi-structured interviews and email correspondence that
took place between 2014 and 2015. It also included analysis of specific social
media posts that the participant, Steevee, identified as illustrative of her
Steevee
experiences and practices.
"A fan" by Shannon Sauro is
Slide 36. Extramural English. This study builds upon prior work in online licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
fandom for language learning, which explored the identity and language
development of young fans in online spaces, who were writing fanfiction or created fan websites. It falls

within the category of extramural English, a term that describes “English-related activities that learners
come in contact with or are engaged in outside the walls of the English classroom, generally on a voluntary
basis.” Many studies of extramural English have documented, for example, learning as a result of online
gaming.
Slide 37. Sherlock Holmes. First, a little background on the fandom that Steevee was a part of. Sherlock
Holmes is a London-based, famous fictional private detective who was created by British writer Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle and appeared in detective novels and short stories
between 1887 and 1927. The detective stories of Holmes and his
colleague Dr. Watson have inspired a great many adaptations
over the years.
Slide 38. Sherlock. One such recent and extremely popular

adaptation is the British television series “Sherlock,” which
imagines Sherlock Holmes and John Watson living in 21st-
century London. This show first aired in 2010 and developed an
active fandom on social media sites such as Tumblr and Twitter.
Subsequent seasons are aired every two to three years, leaving
fans long periods to speculate the resolution to each season’s
cliffhanger. While the show is on hiatus, fans naturally write
fanfiction and speculation among other things, and when filming
begins, many like going to the filming sites to see if they can gather
Sherlock Holmes
information to guess the plot of the show. This practice of going to
and gathering information on the filming, referred to as “setlock” "The pipe was still between his lips" by Sidney
Paget is licensed under CC BY 2.0
by the Sherlock fandom, is relevant to Steevee’s case.
Slide 39. Key moments in Steevee’s fan history. Steevee is a fan from Eastern Germany in her early 30s.
She’s always been a fan of things, especially music. Growing up, she was a fan of the musical group The
Kelly Family and also of David Hasselhoff, but she didn’t discover fandom until 2009 when a convergence
of personal and professional factors came together. That year, shortly after she returned to Germany from
a few years spent in the United States and was
missing using English, a friend introduced her to the
American television show “Supernatural” which
Steevee began to watch and enjoy. She soon joined
Twitter and created her first fan Facebook page. She
also began studying English and other foreign
language teaching at university, with the goal of one
day living in London. In 2010, she joined the fandoms
for two British television shows, “Torchwood” and
“Doctor Who,” and created a fan Tumblr account. In
Set of the show “Sherlock”
2012, she saw her first episode of “Sherlock” and
joined the “Sherlock” fandom. In 2013, filming of the "#Setlock" by Shannon Sauro is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

next series of “Sherlock” began in London and Cardiff, and Steevee began compiling and reporting on
updates coming out of setlock over Twitter and Tumblr. As a result, she found herself developing fact-
checking skills, brevity, and speed in English for posting up-to-date and accurate information quickly for
fans interested in following reports of filming or discovering leads about speculation online.
Slide 40. At the time she entered fandom, Steevee was

highly motivated to develop her English skills. In
particular, she had a strong desire to shift her English
from American to British English, with the goal of one day
living in London. However, motivation is not just an
individual issue. As Ushioda explains, “As we have noted,
motivation is never simply in the hands of the motivated
individual learner but is constructed and constrained
through social relations with others.” This was something
Steevee had become aware of, which is why she had
shifted from fandoms based on a U.S. television show to
fandoms based on British television shows.
London
Slide 41. Steevee developed social relations with
"London Eye" by Shannon Sauro is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
members of British English fandoms via social media
outlets as a way to gain access to and participate in social
communities of practice for the purpose of developing a new identity, proficient speaker of British English,
and for the purpose of mobility. In her own words: “I tried to shift my accent from American English to
British English. I tried to learn to write colour with ‘ou’ and so on. And I started to watch Doctor Who and
Torchwood. Those were my next two big fandoms.” Her decision to become active in online fandom was
also influenced by social factors, especially those she encountered in university: “It was the opportunity
to completely immerse myself in the English language. That was it for me. I was so stoked. I’m going to
get online and I’m going to talk to people and learn English. And I’m going to learn new words. And I used
to sit there with a notepad next to Twitter and write down words I’d never seen before, look them up,
learn them. Because that’s how I acquired language because I was in a German country going to university
where even the English classes were held in German. I wasn’t learning anything and I wanted to learn.”

Slide 42. Spoiling. Steevee developed her English
vocabulary and social media skills in online fandom, and
by 2013, after she’d been in the “Sherlock” fandom for
a year, filming on the next series and setlock had begun.
Steevee soon found herself engaging in a new fan
practice known as spoiling or “the purposeful discovery
of crucial developments in the plot of a fictional story of
a film or TV series before the relevant material has been
broadcast or released.” This began when she gathered
links to tweets from cast and crew about the first day of
filming and posted an update to Tumblr. In response,
she began attracting a high number of followers, eager
for daily updates and speculation about where filming Set of the show “Sherlock”
would be taking place next. "#Setlock in Cardiff" by Shannon Sauro is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
Slide 43. Steevee explained that as her presence in fandom grew, mainly due to setlock, she began to
monitor her English more carefully for a wider audience. She observed that you could be attacked either
way by both native and non-native speakers of English due to misunderstandings, but in her experience,
the non-native speakers are really the loose cannon because they might understand something incorrectly
because of their own lack of knowledge of the English language or sarcasm or whatever is being used as
a metaphor, for example.” Steevee also found that more and more people began looking to her as source
of all kinds of trustworthy information and that this affected how much more careful she had to become
in her word choice and explanations.
Slide 44. As she explains it, “Due to the massive increase of hits and
followers due to setlock, I somehow became someone who was
consulted on various things and I realized that if I wanted to
help/give answers etc, I’d have to make myself understood in the
way I wanted to be – that’s when my answers got longer and more
in-depth, as I wanted to make sure my arse was covered.” What
Steevee began doing was writing longer posts that were divided
into two parts for two very different audiences. She would include
a barebones explanation of things, often in list form, with links and
illustrations that could be read by less proficient English speakers.
This would be followed by more detailed explanations that
included humor and insider jokes that could be understood by
more proficient English speakers with greater vocabulary and
cultural knowledge about the show, actors, and British society.
Slide 45. Steevee’s original motivation for becoming involved in London

online British-based fandoms was to develop her English for the "#SherlockLives" by Shannon Sauro is licensed under CC
purpose of one day living and working in London. After completing BY-NC 4.0

her university degree, she was able to find work in London as a nanny, where she continued to seek out
more permanent jobs. She found that her involvement in online fandom helped her adjust to living in a
large international city. “I know I have those tools because of fandom. To think differently. To think
critically. Especially to try to see it from a different point of view. And fandom has provided me with so
many tools regarding my own everyday life and also accepting the other lives around me as part of the
whole.” Beyond this, fandom had also helped make her develop language and social media skills valuable
to different industries. In Spring 2016, Steevee came across a job announcement for a firm on London’s
South Bank seeking a bilingual German/English speaker for a position in online publicity and
communications. The job requirements included expertise working with clients from multiple countries,
social media skills, Internet research skills, and native writing skills in both German and English. She’s been
working there since June.
Slide 46. Fun activities for incidental vocabulary learning are really important because they engage
students and they keep them motivated to continue to work in English. But remember students need
both, incidental vocabulary learning and intentional vocabulary learning. And it’s usually our job as
teachers to remind them of that.
Slide 47. Advice for teachers. Professor Ranalli has already provided some useful concepts about
vocabulary. I asked him specifically for some ideas about how to teach vocabulary and here’s what he
said.
Slide 48. The best advice I can give to teachers about teaching vocabulary is to first
familiarize yourself with all the aspects of word knowledge beyond basic meaning
that are important for accurate and appropriate use. I’m talking about things like
collocation—words co-occurring with other words. For example, in English, we say
“take medicine” instead of “eat medicine,” which would be the more likely
translation in many languages. Knowing what a word means also includes knowing
what other words typically go together with that word. Another aspect of word
Prof. Jim Ranalli meaning is register. Register has to do with the typical contexts—the social
"Prof. Jim Ranalli" by Iowa contexts, the usage contexts—of particular words. For example, a student should
State University is licensed know the words “friendly” and “gregarious.” Although they’re very similar in
under CC BY 4.0
meaning, they’re used in different contexts. We can use the word “friendly” to
describe someone in casual conversation, but the word “gregarious” is more formal and much less
common, so it would sound weird in conversation but would be okay in some types of writing.
Another aspect of word knowledge is the spoken and written forms--in other words, how a word is spelled
and how it’s pronounced. All of these things are important for students to be aware of because they help
us to use words the right way. Most students still think vocabulary learning means learning the meanings
of words, so they neglect these other aspects of word knowledge. As a teacher, if you can first make sure
your students are aware of these other aspects of word knowledge, what they are and why they matter,
that’s a big part of it. The teacher can also help by consistently and frequently pointing out these other
aspects of word knowledge when introducing new vocabulary in class. When planning your teaching of
vocabulary, try to anticipate what students may find challenging about a word in terms of usage and teach

to that. For example, if you’re teaching the word “medicine” to a group of beginners, and you know in
their native language, they say the equivalent of “eat medicine,” you can head off potential errors by
pointing out that in English, these two words aren’t used together. Instead, we say “take medicine” to
mean the same thing. I think that kind of awareness raising and that kind of targeted teaching is one of
the best ways that teachers can help their students come to grips with the vocabulary of English.
Slide 49. One of the most important things that Professor Ranalli pointed out is that there is more to
vocabulary than word meaning. Students need to learn about all the aspects of word knowledge:
collocation, register, written and spoken form. In other words, students need to learn how words are
used, with what words they’re used, on what occasions they are used, and whether they will be used
prominently in writing or speaking or both.
Slide 50. Professor Ranalli gave us some examples of collocation, of words that go together. He pointed
out that in English we say that we take medicine, but we eat lunch. We “take medicine” rather than “eating
medicine.” In English you just don’t say “eat medicine,” even though you do eat it. We eat lunch and in
English we don’t say “take lunch.” That just doesn’t sound like English. If you say you’re going to take
lunch, I might think “take it where?” Teaching vocabulary includes teaching words that go together.
Slide 51. Students should learn about register. They need to know vocabulary choice is contingent on the
register of language use. There are certain situations where words are used. Different words are used for
talking among friends than in a classroom or business meeting, for example. Teachers need to teach
students to be aware of the contexts where they find words, and provide students with words in a variety
of contexts, always with attention to the context.
Slide 52. Students should learn about all aspects of word knowledge: written and spoken forms, context
of use and collocations. And teachers should provide students with a lot of exposure to vocabulary while
raising their awareness of their important features.
Slide 53. How can technology help? Professor Ranalli’s insights to how vocabulary is learned are very
informative to us as we think about how technology can help. Based on what he said, I would suggest the
following: We can show students how to use vocabulary tools to look up words while reading. We can
teach students to search the Internet to find images and examples of vocabulary in use. We can use a
corpus to help show students word patterns. We can also encourage students to use spellcheckers to
learn correct spelling. And we can introduce students to online communities outside the classroom, such
as fanfiction communities. Let’s take a look at some examples of each of these types of technology uses
for vocabulary.
Slide 54. A vocabulary tool to use while reading… Here’s an example of one vocabulary tool that students
can use while they’re reading. It’s called “Lingro” and it allows students to attach the text they are reading
to the Lingro program. And the Lingro program becomes a dictionary for every word in the text!

Lingro
This work is a derivative of "Lingro" by Lingro. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by
FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Slide 55.
Where the arrow appears is the place where the student
can type in a website and the lingro program will attach to
that text in that website in order to provide definitions for
the words. Let’s see how it works.
Slide 56. Here’s a story in The New York Times about Donald
Trump’s tough talk on trade. The story is about some of the
things Trump said shortly after he was elected president.
The New York Times

This work is a derivative of "The New York Times" by The New York Times.
This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-
Slide 57. The Lingro program makes the text look different. Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Lingro view of article

This work is a derivative of "The New York Times" by Lingro. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the
AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

Slide 58. The Lingro program allows the students to move the cursor to any word that he or she want to
see defined and then click, and the dictionary definition comes up for each of the words. So there is
“secure” in the first sentence: “Donald J. Trump secured the White House in part with his vow to bring
manufacturing jobs back to
America.” If we want to look up
the word “secured,” we just
move the cursor there and click
on it and then it gives dictionary
definition of that word.
Slide 59. The dictionary

definition of the word “deem”
is shown on the slide.
Slide 60. There’s another Lingro view of article

example from the same text. In
this case we clicked on the word This work is a derivative of "The New York Times" by Lingro. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0
by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
“vulnerable” and “vulnerable”
then appears defined so that
the student can see, literally,
any word in the text defined.
It’s like having a mobile
electronic dictionary with the
text that the student wishes to
read.
Slide 61. Search. Another way

of working with words on the
Internet is to simply search for
all the texts that have a Lingro view of article
particular word. For example, if
we work with the word This work is a derivative of "The New York Times" by Lingro. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0
“vulnerable” even farther then
we will see what we find if we simply type it in the browser and see what appears.
Slide 62. Search All. For many words the first finding from a search will be a dictionary definition and so
the student, literally, has a dictionary at hand whenever he or she is sitting in front of the computer.

Google search
This work is a derivative of "Search results for vulnerable" by Google. This
derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher
Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Slide 63. Search Images. Another interesting way to work with words on the Internet is to search for
images. Again we typed in “vulnerable” and take a look at the images that we find. There are some really
interesting ones that come up for this; some are abstract work.
Google image search for the word “vulnerable”

This work is a derivative of "Image search results for vulnerable" by Google. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the
AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Slide 64. Here is what we get if we type the word “secure”.
Google image search for the word “secure”

This work is a derivative of "Image search results for secure" by Google. This derivative is licensed under
CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Slide 65. And this works very nicely, of

course, with concrete nouns where the
images clearly make sense. And particularly
for nonconcrete nouns that are more
difficult or beginning level learners who
have a hard time working with the English
definitions. If we type the word
“Dalmatian” we get results that are very
clear as to what Dalmatian means.
Slide 66. There’s the results for Dalmatian.

Really no ambiguity about the meaning of
the word when you find images like that for Google image search for the word “Dalmatian”
students at any level.
This work is a derivative of "Image search results for Dalmatian" by Google. This
derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program,
Slide 67. Word Patterns. Another example
sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
for the technology that is used for
vocabulary learning is the corpus. As I mentioned earlier the corpus of Contemporary American English
provides a great resource for teachers and students to use to look at how words are actually used in text.
We are going to call on our expert on COCA and our corpus man, Joe Geluso to describe a little bit more
about the corpus of Contemporary American English.

Slide 68. Here is the web page
for COCA or the Corpus of
Contemporary American
English, the corpus that we
talked about earlier. I just
wanted to give you a quick look
at the front page of the corpus
so you have an idea of what
we’re talking about with the
web-based corpus. So here we
Joe Geluso can see we have many different
"Joe Geluso" by Iowa features such as list, charts,
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licensed under CC BY 4.0
collocates, compare and quick.
These are features we’ll get Front page of COCA
into later, but for now I just want to do one quick This work is a derivative of "Corpus of Contemporary American English"
search so you have an idea of what COCA looks by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed
like. So let’s say I want to look at the word under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program,
sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
“vocabulary”. I’ll just type in “vocabulary”, I have
list selected so this will just give me a list of the word “vocabulary” in context. And here’s the word
“vocabulary” after we search it, I click on that and now I will see a number of what are called “concordance
lines” that feature will target the word that we just searched, in this case “vocabulary”. So here we can
see things like vocabulary, development, reading experience aides, vocabulary development and just how
the word “vocabulary” is used in context. And we have hundreds and hundreds of examples of how it’s
used because COCA is a really big corpus of about 5 hundred million words.

Slide 69. Spell Checking. Another example of vocabulary tools that are available to everybody is spell
checking. Most word processing programs and many other programs on the Internet when they have an
editor they also have spell checking in the background. These spell-checking options allow students to see
words that they have misspelled and if we bring attention to those words, they can learn to use that
feedback to improve their spelling, thereby learning an aspect of vocabulary.
Spellcheck
"Spellcheck" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Slide 70. In this example we see how certain words were misspelled and students who attended to the
mark up on those words could then do the corrections to get the mark up to disappear. When the words
are spelled correctly they’re no longer underlined in red.
Slide 71. This lecture should provide good basis for you as you work on the other activities in this unit on
teaching vocabulary.

Exploring Technology Tools for Vocabulary
"Student working on assignment" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Prof. Chapelle introduced several resources aimed at helping with vocabulary learning and
teaching. Below you will see descriptions and links to the resources that Prof. Chapelle
discussed in the lecture. For each of these resources, familiarize yourself and explore as
many options as you can. This is an ungraded activity primarily intended to expose you to useful
technology options for teaching vocabulary.
• Voice of America (VOA). Prof. Chapelle introduced the Voice of America website and
highlighted two sections that could be used to support instruction.
o News Words: Obliterated
o Additional News Words Stories
o The VOA news reports lesson plans (e.g., Changing Presidents Can Be a 'Very Stressful
Process')
Directions: Visit these web pages and think about how you may be able to incorporate them
into your teaching.
• Lingro.com. Another resource Prof. Chapelle demonstrated was Lingro.com.
Directions: Please click on the link to the website, then enter the URL of your favorite
English News website (e.g., New York Time, Washington Post, etc.) and explore the various
options Lingro provides. You can even change the target language.

• Internet search. Prof. Chapelle demonstrated how to search the internet for vocabulary
items.
Directions: Use your favorite Internet browser to replicate the searches Prof. Chapelle
demonstrated with the words "vulnerable," "secure," and "dalmatian". Then search for words
you are interested in and take notes on what works and what does not work.
• Spell Checker
Directions: Use your favorite word processing application (e.g., Microsoft Word, GoogleDocs,
SMS autocorrect, etc) and experiment with the spell check function. What mistakes does it
detect? what mistakes does it not detect? What suggestions does the spell checker make?

Discussion: Using Technology to Teach Vocabulary
"Learning country-related vocabulary" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
You just explored Voice of America, Lingro.com, and searching the internet for vocabulary
words and spell checkers. Maybe you have used these before, or maybe you have other ideas.
Please share your experiences with teaching vocabulary. Do you use technology to teach
vocabulary? How might you start to incorporate technology? Share your ideas by writing about
how you could incorporate them into your teaching practice, and share resources you have
found to be useful.
Directions:
Write a discussion post explaining how you teach vocabulary. What technological resources are
you using in your teaching? Please include the links.
After you've posted, read some of your classmates’ ideas so that you can expand your
repertoire of teaching resources, and feel free to reply.

Grammar and Technology
"Listening activity" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
We hope you learned many useful aspects of how to use educational technology to teach
vocabulary. Now we will move on to the topic of "Teaching Grammar Using Technology."
Goals:
After this week you will have...
• Met our grammar expert, Professor Bethany Gray

• Learned about why teaching grammar is important
• Learned about what teachers should know when teaching grammar
• Learned about available online resources for teaching and learning English grammar
• Explored and practiced five basic functions in the Corpus of Contemporary American English
(COCA)

Teaching Grammar Using Technology
[The video can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlE2-

ekUHe80EJOkn377cv6dTczTRtI_B ]
Part 1
Slide 1. In this module, we explore how technology can support grammar teaching.
Professor Carol Chapelle will introduce us to the technology-grammar connection.
Slide 2. In this Lecture. In this lecture, we’ll talk about the connection between
technology and grammar. Then we’ll meet our grammar expert, Professor Bethany
Gray. We’ll ask Professor Gray why grammar is so important for students, what
teachers should know about grammar, and then what advice she would have for Prof. Carol Chapelle
teachers.
"Professor Carol Chapelle"
Slide 3. The Technology-Grammar Connection. There are important connections by Iowa State University is
between technology and grammar. Technology provides access to many different
ways for students to study grammar. Also, technology has
changed the way that linguists study grammar; we talked
about corpus linguistics in the first lesson. Teachers can find
many resources to help teach grammar on the Internet. We’ll
take a quick look at two examples for grammar teaching:
Everyday Grammar from Voice of America and Corpus of
Contemporary American English that you’ve already been
introduced to.
Slide 4. This is an example of Everyday Grammar TV on the

Voice of America website. It has a number of lessons on
specific grammatical points; such as adverbs, prepositions
(such as for, with and to), demonstratives and so on. Each one
Everyday Grammar page
of these lessons has an explanation and lots of examples for
students to see and work with. “Everyday Grammar TV” by VoA Learning English. This content
is copyrighted, and cannot be adapted in any way, or
Slide 5. In this example in Everyday Grammar on the Voice of distributed after the end of this course. It is not Public Domain
or Creative Commons-licensed, and therefore not for public
America website we see this explanation of reported speech. use. Please do not save a copy for your personal use, and do
The speaker gives an example of what reported speech is and not use it after the course ends.
the student can listen to the explanation of how reported
speech is used and how it’s formed grammatically.

Everyday Grammar video
“Everyday Grammar: Reported Speech” by VoA Learning English. This content is copyrighted, and cannot be adapted in any
way, or distributed after the end of this course. It is not Public Domain or Creative Commons-licensed, and therefore not for
public use. Please do not save a copy for your personal use, and do not use it after the course ends.
Slide 6. Students and teachers can complement that explanation of reported speech by taking a look at
how reported speech, using “said that”, is used in actual everyday English language. This is an example
of what we find in the Corpus of Contemporary American English if we do a search for the phrase “said
that”. There are lots of examples here to look at how this expression is used and so it gives students an
idea of how
reported speech
works in everyday
language.
Slide 7. Meet our

Grammar Expert.
But grammar is really
a difficult topic, it’s
very complex and
somewhat
mysterious how
students actually
acquire grammar so
that they can
actually use it. We’ll
now turn to meeting
our expert on COCA search results for “said that”
grammar, Professor This work is a derivative of "Search results for said that" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is
Bethany Gray. licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Professor Gray teaches and researches English grammar. Her research uses large samples of language to
find out how people really use grammar when they speak and write. I asked Professor Gray how she
became interested in grammar, and this is what she said:
Slide 8. Prof. Chapelle: How did you get interested in grammar?
Prof. Gray: Well, I became interested in grammar and linguistics when I was in
high school as a first-year high school student, I started to learn Spanish. And I
was really bad at it, I kept getting low scores on my tests and I couldn’t figure
out why. And one day all of a sudden everything just clicked. I realized why I
should use a particular form of a verb instead of a different form. After that point
I started to notice lots of patterns in the language that I was learning. It became
Prof. Bethany Gray sort of an obsession of mine to look for these patterns in Spanish.
I continued and when I studied Spanish in high school, as a senior I got to choose
"Prof. Bethany Gray" by Iowa
State University is licensed
under CC BY 4.0 my final project. My teacher said: find any kind of project related to the Spanish
language. I decided to write a grammar. It was a really bad grammar. I didn’t
know much grammar of Spanish at that point but it reinforced my interest in language structure and in
explaining and presenting that structure formally. As I went on to college and begin studying linguistics I
was fascinated by all those language problems where you have to decide on the structure of a language
example and explain it.
When I started to teach, and I stared to teach ESL grammar and ESL writing, I realized that it was something
that I really enjoyed doing. As I went forward and actually started teaching grammar to native speakers
and teaching them how to analyze their own language, I realized that it’s a really good topic to teach
because every language user can connect to it. They all use grammar and now it’s just about making them
interested in being able to explain the grammar that they use or why they use that grammar. So it’s a way
for me to make explicit connections between what we do every day in our life with how we can describe
that in terms of structure.
Slide 9. Have you ever meet anyone that decided to “write a grammar?” Well, professor Gray did! She
said when she was studying Spanish, she decided to “write a grammar”. And this, she said, is what made
her interested in the structure of language. What did Professor Gray mean when she said that she wanted
to “write a grammar?”
Slide 10. When Professor Gray said she wrote a grammar, she meant that she discovered the rules of the
language and wrote them down. For example, in English you could start with examples like this: I bought
a chocolate cake. The clerk put it in a big box. We ate it at the birthday party. These are examples of
sentences in English, and so how can we write a grammar that describes those sentences?
Slide 11. To write a grammar describing these sentences, you would look at their structure. You find some
things that are the same in all the sentences. In our example sentences we identify 3 things that are similar
the first one I put in red and that is that there is a person at the beginning of the sentence. “I” refers to
the speaker in the first sentence. “Clerk” refers to the person in the store. “We” refers to me and
somebody else in the third.

Example sentences
"Example sentences" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
The second thing that I find in common is that each one has a verb. There’s a word that says we did
something: “bought,” “put,” and “ate,” the verbs, are in blue. And the third thing that I found in common
is that at the end of a sentence there is a complex of 3 words and those are a noun phrase. That contains
a noun and an adjective and a determiner or an article, as we call it sometimes. So each one of the
sentences has a person or subject at the beginning. In the middle there’s a verb that indicates some
action. Then at the end, there’s a noun phrase that has 3 parts: a noun, an adjective and an article or a
determiner.
Slide 12. To write the grammar then, we have to write a description of what the sentences have in
common. And we can do it as I’ve shown here; with a PERSON, a VERB and a NOUN PHRASE. That
description is for those 3 sentences and that description is what we would call the grammar. And obviously
it’s a simple grammar and it doesn’t even account for all the words in all of those sentences but it’s a start.
It’s a type of description and so it would count as a grammar.
Example grammar
"Example grammar" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Slide 13. This gives us a better idea of what we mean by writing a grammar. When you write a grammar,
you create rules that are based on specific examples. Figuring out grammar rules from examples is one
way to learn a language. Figuring out grammar rules is also important for teaching language. So, in fact,
writing grammars is something that both, we as English teachers and our students as English learners need
to be able to do.

Slide 14. An Example from English Teaching Forum. Let’s take a look at
another example. This one comes from an article in the English Teaching
Forum and it shows how important it is for teachers to be able to write
grammars, or in other words, analyze real examples of language in order
to identify the grammar rules.
Slide 15. Present Perfect Progressive. In that article the authors talk about
their analysis of the English verb tense and aspect called the present
perfect progressive. I’ve got a couple of examples from their article. In
their article they show lots of examples of sentences that they obtained
from a corpus and here are just a couple of them:
English Teaching Forum

I’ve been hearing a lot about the Internet collapse since 1977.
This work is a derivative of "Alternatives to
Good afternoon, Dr. Smith. I’m Lucy and I’m 59. I’d like to share a Current Pedagogy for Teaching the Present
Perfect Progressive" by English Teaching Forum.
positive thing that I have found in the last year or so. I’ve been This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by
hiking and find that this is a wonderful way to keep your weight FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program,
down and meet some people and just really feel good. sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
These sentences use the present perfect progressive which has the “I have.” “Have” is an auxiliary, the
verb “be” as the following auxiliary and “ing” at the end of the verb. The second example comes from a
radio talk show where the speaker says: Ok, so again in that second example, “I’ve been hiking,” is the use
of the present perfect progressive. In these examples and the ones they show in the article the question
is when is this tense and aspect chosen by writers in the course of English?
Slide 16. Figuring Out Grammar Rules. The authors explain why it’s so important for teacher to be able
to figure out the grammar rules. They first point out that grammar books focus on describing the form of
the grammar. For example, “I’ve been hearing” is have + been + the verb in “ing.” So that tells you how to
construct that grammatical form but it doesn’t tell you when to use that grammatical form. Then the
second issue is that many grammar books are based on intuition. A lot of the grammar rules that we find
in those books are either wrong or they’re just incomplete. They don’t really provide detail to help
somebody figure out the tense and aspect to use in their own language.
Slide 17. The authors show how they figured out better rules than what they could find in any grammar
books.
Slide 18. They conducted their analysis by looking at real language in a corpus
Slide 19. Grammar books can be wrong. By looking at real language use in a corpus they were able to find
a good example that shows how grammar books can be wrong. The grammar books reported that stative
or non-action verbs such as know, hear, mean, see, and want cannot occur with the present perfect
progressive. So the word “hear,” according to the grammar books, is never used with the present perfect
progressive. If you look at the real language in the corpus, as we saw on the previous slide, we find that

there are 648 instances of present perfect progressive in real language use with the verb “hear!” This type
of discrepancy between the intuition-based grammar books and the language-based analysis that comes
from the corpus has been a very interesting and revealing development in the study of grammar in our
Examples in COCA
This work is a derivative of "Search results for have been hearing" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed
under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
field.
Slide 20. Why Grammar is important. I asked Professor Gray to tell us why she thinks that grammar is so
important for English learners to control. She said that grammar allows us to express complex ideas. Let’s
listen.
Slide 21. Prof. Chapelle: Why do you think it’s important to teach grammar to students?
Prof. Gray: Well grammar is one part of language that allows us to convey
complex ideas. When we have vocabulary items we can convey a single idea or
a simple item. And we can covey a lot of with vocabulary items. For sure we
need to have a lot of vocabulary in order to use grammar effectively but
grammar allows us to express ideas that are larger than a single concept or a
single item that we want to convey. Grammar is about how we combine words
Prof. Bethany Gray into these larger meaningful units. It is how we combine words into phrases. It
is how we combine phrases into clauses or sentences.
under CC BY 4.0 When we do that, we can do things like talk about what happened yesterday or
what will happen tomorrow. It is how we can indicate that we’re stating
something instead of asking a question, or that we're making a request. So when we study grammar, we’re
looking at how words relate to other words in our clauses and how it relays to the meaning that we want
to convey. So we use grammar in order to communicate these complex ideas and we also use grammar
to understand complex ideas. In an educational study in particular our goal is to learn. We can’t learn
information that is conveyed to us unless we understand the ideas, the complex ideas, that are being
represented in language either in writing or speaking.
Slide 22. Professor Gray said that grammar lets us combine words to make phrases, phrases to make
clauses, and clauses to make sentences. She pointed out that vocabulary provides the building blocks but
those blocks get put together to say things by using the rules of grammar. We need to be able to build
complex sentences to understand and learn complex things.

Slide 23. So words name things. We can say “cake” and we know we refer to that cake in the picture.
There’s a “clerk” that refers to the clerk standing there. When we say “party” we might have an image like
a birthday party that we see in the other picture. Each of these words mean something and so in that
sense words have a very important role to play in conveying meaning.
Cake Clerk Party
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licensed under CC BY 2.0 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Slide 24. We need sentences to convey what’s going on. For example; “I bought a chocolate cake,” “The
clerk put it in a big box,” and “We ate it at the birthday party.” That tells what’s happening in a way that
naming things just can’t do. It takes grammar in order to put the words together in order to convey what’s
happening, something that’s going on, and, as professor Gray pointed out, to convey anything that’s
complex.
Part 2
Slide 25. What teachers should know. I asked professor Gray what teachers need to know about
grammar. She emphasized some of characteristics of grammar and ways of talking about it. Let’s listen.
Slide 26.
Prof. Chapelle: What’s the most important thing for teachers to understand about grammar?
Prof. Gray: There are 2 major ways of thinking about and approaching grammar
and one is prescriptive grammar. The idea is that we can talk about grammar
from the perspective of what language users should do with language or how we
should use grammar.
An alternative approach is descriptive grammar and that means exactly what it

sounds like: we want to describe how language users actually use language and
Prof. Bethany Gray
much of that means describing the grammar that these language users are using.
"Prof. Bethany Gray" by Iowa When we teach grammar explicitly we need to negotiate between descriptive
under CC BY 4.0 and prescriptive grammar because we do have to teach rules, but we also want
to teach people to use language in a way that’s natural and authentic.

Another issue that’s related to grammar instruction is the issue of implicit and explicit knowledge. So as
language users we have a lot of implicit knowledge about how the grammar of a language works but we
can’t always explicitly state that knowledge. And so we have to be able to begin to explicitly talk about
the grammar and the structures of the language.
A third important thing about teaching grammar is that in order to fully address grammar and grammatical
structure, we have to pay attention about form and function. Form refers to the actual structure or
formation of words, phrases and clauses. We have many forms in English and teaching grammar means
teaching how to control and how to use those structures. For example, the words “the tasty cookies” is a
noun phrase because it has the noun “cookies” in it, and that’s the form of this phrase. However, we won’t
get very far in explaining how to use English if we don’t also consider the function of words and phrases.
We can talk about the grammatical function of particular forms or how that form relates to other words
or phrases in the sentences. So for example, “the tasty cookies” could be the subject like in the sentence
“The tasty cookies are on the table.” Or it can be the object of a verb “I love the tasty cookies”.
In addition to that local function we can talk about a broader or bigger function and this is what we call
the discourse function. It’s about what the grammatical structures are allowing us to do in the language.
So for example, we might talk about passive voice and a bigger function of passive voice it to allow us to
focus less on the person that’s doing the action of the verb.
A final thing that I’ll mention is this idea of variation in grammar. Based on very large studies of authentic
language we know that in different situations speakers and writers use grammar in different ways. So the
grammar that I am using to talk to you today is not the same as the grammar that I would use in an email
or writing an academic paper. And we know that when people have to learn how to use language in
different situations they have to learn how to control a large range of different grammatical structures.
And this is the concept that we call register variation. So learning to speak a language or write a language
also means learning how to produce these different structures in different contexts.
Slide 27. Professor Gray emphasized that there’s a lot that teachers should know about grammar. One is
the ways of describing grammar: Is it descriptive grammar or prescriptive grammar that we’re talking
about? Ways of knowing grammar: The students have explicit knowledge grammar or implicit knowledge.
Then she talked about the 2 faces of grammar: its form and
its function. She also talked about the scope of grammar,
sentence versus discourse. And finally, the fact that there’s
variation in grammar.
Slide 28. Let’s take a look at these important characteristics

of grammar that teachers should know. One is the
distinction between descriptive and prescriptive. A
descriptive grammar tells how sentences are made by real
people as they use the language. It would have a
description such as sentences are made from these parts:
"Teacher giving a lecture" by Iowa State University is

the PERSON, the VERB and then the NOUN PHRASE. That’s a descriptive statement: it says how sentences
are put together.
In contrast we often work with prescriptive grammar. Prescriptive rules

are like this example: when you write a sentence you must include
these parts: a PERSON, a VERB and a NOUN PHRASE. Prescriptive rules
usually have the modal auxiliaries “must” or “should” in them. They tell
students what rules there are that they should be following. We work
with both types of grammar when we’re teaching English to
international students.
Slide 29. Even though English language teachers work with both
descriptive and prescriptive grammars, some people like to describe the "Student working in computer lab" by Iowa
difference between these two groups by saying that the linguists write State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
descriptive grammar. They are doing the research on the language that
is actually used and English teachers enforce prescriptive grammar rules. English teachers are there to tell
students what they should do. This is a pretty black and white view of the world, where linguists are doing
the research with the descriptive grammars and the teachers are enforcing rules. In reality we work with
both descriptive and prescriptive grammars but we should know the difference because it is an important
one.
Slide 30. The distinction between explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge is extremely important for
teaching. Explicit knowledge means that you have the knowledge you need to talk about language so you
can say things like, “sentences have verbs,” a statement that we could make about language. It is used to
talk about language and so it’s called metalanguage. “Meta” means above or outside of language, so the
word “verb” itself is an example of metalanguage.
Second there’s implicit knowledge: that’s the knowledge that’s used

when we produce and understand language. People can say “I
bought a cake,” “I ate a tasty cookie,” or “I like pie.” All of those
sentences can be said without being able to name which word in the
sentence is a verb. So you can use language knowledge without
having explicit language knowledge to talk about the language.
Slide 31. The distinction between form and function is also very
important. Form refers to the rules for creating the structure of "Women eating cookies" by Iowa State
sentences. For example, a noun phrase is created by putting University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
together a determiner, an adjective and a noun. I put the determiner
and adjective in parentheses because those are actually optional. You can have a noun phrase with just a
noun. So a phrase like “a tasty cookie” is a good noun phrase, it has all of those parts in that order, whereas
“cookie tasty a” is not a good noun phrase according to those rules of form for a good noun phrase.
Function in contrast refers to the rules for using language to get things done. If you want “a tasty cookie”
you need more than a noun phrase, you need to be able to say, “I want a tasty cookie.”

Grammar rule
"Grammar rule" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Slide 32. You also need to be able to say “I want a tasty cookie” in the right time, in the right place to the
right person in order to make the function of the meaning of that sentence actually get you a cookie.
That’s the function of language, its ability to get new things.
Slide 33. Grammar is used in discourse to get things done. When we have a sentence like “I want a tasty
cookie” that single sentence typically functions in a larger context. That larger language context is called
the discourse. So the discourse in which we find that sentence might be something like “what would you
like with your coffee?”, The response, “a tasty cookie,” and another response to “ok is chocolate good?”
would probably get you a cookie.
Slide 34. Advice for Teachers. Professor Gray has already provided some useful concepts about grammar
and they actually get kind of complicated. So I asked specifically for some ideas about how to teach
grammar. This is a controversial issue among researchers. Some say that grammar should not be taught
explicitly. In other words, rules, metalanguage, should not be taught. Others say that it must be taught
explicitly. That’s the only way that students will really learn. So that’s a pretty good controversy in the
field. Here’s what Professor Gray said.
Slide 35. Professor Gray
Prof. Chapelle: What advice do you have for teachers about teaching grammar?
Prof. Gray: One of the hardest things about teaching grammar is that sometimes
it seems really straightforward to teach students how to create a grammatical
structure or grammatical form. For example, I can teach students how to form
the present perfect aspect of a verb phrase. I’ve done this many times before.
Students may be able to then complete some very guided exercises where they
take verbs and they put them into the present perfect aspect and do this with a
Prof. Bethany Gray high degree of accuracy. But what becomes harder is when that student needs
to go away and in a less structure context like in conversation or in writing a
State University is licensed paper on their own. They may have trouble knowing when they should use the
under CC BY 4.0 present perfect aspect when they’re speaking or writing.
This is one of the reasons why it’s so important when we teach grammar to pay
attention both to form and to use or the function of these grammatical structures that we focus on. In
particular grammar teaching can be made much more useful and much more engaging when we teach
using a lot of examples and when we explicitly address both the form and function of grammatical
features. So we need to know not just how to form it but also when to use it and what types of meaning
those grammar structures convey. When we want to include examples we want those examples to reflect
the language that we expect our learners to encounter in the real world. So, we want them to see

examples like the language they’re going to hear outside of the classroom or the language structures that
they need to use for educational purposes.
Now sometimes we use what we call online corpora or very large collections of authentic language to get
these very authentic and real language examples. But this isn’t always possible in some cases and in some
cases it may not even be desirable because often authentic language is very messy and it may be more
complex than what our students are ready for. But the key is that these examples should reflect the
general patterns and they should be similar to authentic language even if they’re not real life example
themselves. Sometimes when we present these examples they are presented in isolation, we usually have
some degree of context.
So verb phrases are presented in the context of sentences, and sentences are presented in the context of
conversations or of text. This is a very useful tool when we want to see the language structures being
used within a broader context. We use grammar within a particular context to communicate if we need
to complain. It’s because we’re in a particular situation and so when we teach grammar we also want to
keep that situation relevant and we want to teach it related to the context in which we use the grammar.
Slide 36. Professor Gray said that we should use some guided exercises to give students practice with
grammar form. This to me sounds like explicit grammar teaching. She also said that we should provide
task requiring students to express themselves so that they will have to use the grammatical forms to
express the meanings and functions that are their own ideas. To me this sounds like the use of implicit
knowledge. She also said that we should provide examples of grammar that demonstrate real language
use.
Slide 37. Guided Practice: Present Perfect Progressive. Here’s an example of the kind of activities that
Professor Gray means by guided practice. These are some examples of how students might practice with
the present perfect progressive. If they’re given sentences like the ones below, they can be asked to simply
fill in the blank using the present perfect progressive. So for the first one the student could fill in “the
students” blank “in line for 3 hours to buy tickets, but still don’t have them”. Students need to think about
the verb that would fit in that sentence. So, what do you do in line? Well, you wait. The students wait in
line. No, perfect progressive, the students have been waiting in line for 3 hours to buy tickets. The second
one, “it” something “all day so the rivers are very high.” Well, what makes the rivers high? Well, it’s rain
of course; water makes the river high. It rains all day so the rivers are high. No, present perfect progressive,
it has been raining all day so the rivers are very high. Third, “this is obviously an issue that you” something
“on for some time.” “This is obviously an issue.” what do you do with an issue? Something "on," a verb
that works with on, work. This is obviously an issue that you work on for some time. No, present perfect
progressive: this is obviously an issue that you have been working on for some time. So these are the types
of practice activities that Bethany refers to by guided practice.

Guided Practice Exercise
"Guided practice exercise" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Slide 38. And this is the completed set of sentences.
Guided Practice Exercise
"Guided practice exercise" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Slide 39. An example of much less structured or guided practice comes from one of the games that you
can find in the American English Website. This game is called "The Longest Sentence." Students work with
little blocks that have words on them and the students can build sentences using those word bricks.
Slide 40. So what about explicit teaching of grammar? Professor Gray says yes, but students also need
practice in creating meanings without structure. So she suggests using both exercises that require explicit
grammar knowledge as well as those that require the use of implicit knowledge. She also points out that
students need to see grammar in discourse. Lots of examples are needed. Students also need to have
opportunities to use the grammar for real communication.

Part 3
Slide 41. How Can Technology Help? With this advice in mind how can technology help? Well, to start,
teachers can get ideas for how to make grammar practice fun. Also the Internet is full of real examples of
language use. Teachers can find examples to illustrate grammar that they want students to use. Teachers
can also use a corpus to find examples and then they can also use controlled corpus activities to let
students write their own grammar rules for English.
Slide 42. On the American English website there are lots of interesting games that students can play to
help them learn and practice with grammar.
Slide 43. The American English Facebook page also has a lot of grammar--lots of different topics of English
grammar, where students can do explicit learning and you can use it for explicit teaching of grammar.
Slide 44. Measure words is just one of the many grammar topics that are on the Facebook page. This one
deals with measure words, the expressions that are used in English to measure things, such as a grain of
sand, a bottle of water, a piece of advice, a piece of furniture or a piece of luggage, a cup of tea and a slice
of bread. These types of measure words of course are very important for everyday conversation and they
are presented here very systematically. And there’s also discussion of each of these topics on the
Facebook page.
Facebook page topic
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for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Slide 45. Real Examples. Real examples of some grammatical constructions can be found by doing a simple
search on the Internet. If you use quotation marks around the expression that you want to see it will give
you exact matches for that expression. When I typed in “I have been waiting,” for example, I saw some
examples of that verb used in the present perfect progressive.

Slide 46. The first things that come up when I do that search, are actual discussions of grammar in addition
to some songs that the expression is used in and lots and lots of other examples. You can search the
Internet for real English examples of a variety of types.
Google results page
This work is a derivative of "Search results for I have been waiting" by Google. This derivative is licensed
under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of
State.
Slide 47. If you find an example that looks interesting, you can take a look at the complete text in which
it was found. In this case, I see there’s an example of “I have been waiting a long time,” which was spoken
by a 105-year-old local Cubs fan.

Google results page
This work is a derivative of "Search results for I have been waiting" by Google. This derivative is licensed
Slide 48. When I click on the expression that I found I see the story and I see how the expression was used.
The Cubs, the baseball team of Chicago, won the World Series in fall of 2016 and this is a story about that.
The Cubs winning the World Series for the first time in more than 100 years and no one could be happier
than cubs fan Ray Styrlund. He’s been waiting 105 years to see the Cubs win the World Series. He said, “I
was happy because I have been waiting a long time.” So I guess he has been, but this is a real story that
students can understand and it shows present perfect progressive in real language use that you found on
the Internet.
Slide 49. Corpus. For a more focused linguistic study of “have been waiting” we can turn to the Corpus of
Contemporary American English.
Slide 50. When we type in "have been waiting" we find lots and lots of examples, hundreds of them, in
fact.

COCA results page
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licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Slide 51. When we click on one of the examples to see their larger context of “have been waiting” we get
yet another context where the writer is talking about how he’s so happy to see a new cookbook. The new
cookbook is something that has exactly the kinds of recipes that he’s been waiting for and so he says that
he’s so happy that this cookbook has come out. He loves it. He says, “I have been waiting for you to come
out with this cookbook for a long time.” There we see another real case of the present perfect progressive
being used in a context that the students can understand and as they understand the context that
grammatical function should become more clear to them.
COCA information page
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Slide 53. That concludes our lecture on the use of technology for teaching grammar. We hope it has been
informative for you to look at the different ways technology comes into play with a very modern view of
grammar.

Grammar Teaching Resources
"Exploring online resources for teaching" by Iowa State University is licensed under CC BY 4.0
In the "Technology for Teaching Grammar" lecture, Prof. Chapelle introduces several resources
aimed at helping learners with English grammar. Please explore the web resources Prof.
Chapelle introduced in the lecture that are available in your country. The links to these
resources are also provided below. You can visit these sites and take notes on several grammar
points of interest to you and your students.
This is an ungraded activity primarily intended to expose you to useful technology options for
teaching grammar.
• Voice of America Every Day Grammar TV

• Activate: Games for Learning American English (e.g., Longest Sentence Activity)
• American English Facebook Page (e.g., Measure Words)

Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English
In this section, you will have a chance to learn how to use the five basic functions in COCA for
studying English grammar. This is an ungraded activity primarily intended to expose you to
useful technology options for teaching grammar.
Directions:
Below are six video tutorials about how to use the five basic functions in COCA: List, KWIC,
Collocates, Compare, Chart. You need to watch these tutorials carefully and follow them using
COCA (only if COCA is accessible in your country) so that you can understand each function
clearly.
Then, consider these questions:
1. Which functions do you think might be useful for teaching English grammar in your context?
2. The video mentions that COCA can often be useful for teachers to prepare paper-based
grammar materials for their students. What are possible ways you can think of to use the
COCA tool to help you develop paper-based grammar teaching materials for students?

COCA: The List Function
[The video can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/MRJKd8JOg4Y ]
COCA has five major search functions: List, Chart, Collocates, Compare, and KWIC. We’ll start with List.
List is the most basic function, and it allows you to put in a word or a phrase and then see the wider
context around that word or phrase.
Figure 1. COCA List function
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Let’s start with an example. We’ll type in the word “run” into the search field and look for matching strings.
Type in “run,” then click “Find Matching Strings.”

Figure 2. Find matching strings for "run"
We’ll see that “run” occurs in the corpus 131,714 times.
Figure 3. Frequency information for "run"
This work is a derivative of "Frequency information for run" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY
4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

If we click on the word “run,” we can see the wider context. It always takes COCA a minute to process a
new request. Here, we have the wider context of “run,” and we can see authentic examples of “run” in
use in the corpus.
Figure 4. Authentic examples of usage of "run"
This work is a derivative of "Search results for run" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by
Let’s go back to our search and try to refine that a little bit. Let’s say we want to look at “run” only as it
occurs as a noun. To do that, we type in the word “run” as we have, add a dot, and select a POS (part of
speech) tag. We can select, for example, Noun, and it’ll come up like this.

Figure 5. Selecting POS tag to find matching strings for "run" as noun
Here, we have “run,” dot, square bracket, the tag for noun, square bracket, and then we search.
Figure 6. Find matching strings for "run" as noun

Now, we see we only have 33,796 hits or occurrences of “run” that is tagged as a noun.
Figure 7. Frequency information for "run" as noun
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If we look at “run” as a verb, we can change our tag by deleting it and selecting Verb.
Figure 8. Selecting POS tag to find matching strings for "run" as verb

Now, we do our search, and we see that we have 97,770, so there’s more instances of “run” as a verb
than as a noun.
Figure 9. Frequency information for "run" as a verb
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Another thing that’s interesting in List is that we can search for phrases. For example, if I want to search
for “go for a run,” I’ll get rid of my POS tags because I’m looking for a phrase now, not a word, and I click
Find Matching Strings.
Figure 10. Find matching strings for "go for a run"

We see that “go for a run” happens 57 times.
Figure 11. Frequency information for "go for a run"
This work is a derivative of "Frequency information for go for a run" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed
Then, if I want to click on the context, I can see how the phrase “go for a run” is used. Here, we have
something like “I go for a run around the block,” ”Do you know the best time of the day to go for a run,”
”I was hoping to go for a run,” “He figured he’d go for a run after breakfast,” so it sounds like “go for a
run” is used when someone is talking about exercising or going outside and running.
Figure 12. Authentic examples of usage of "go for a run"
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BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

We can compare this to a different phrase like “take a run.” “Take a run” occurs 53 times, so a little bit
less than “go for a run” in this corpus.
Figure 13. Frequency information for "take a run"
This work is a derivative of "Frequency information for take a run" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under
We can look at “take a run”—“I would take a run before allowing myself to shower,” “He will take a run
at you,” “We’re in a position to take a run at him.” This seems to be used in a little bit different context
than “go for a run.” This is something we’ll come back and explore more with KWIC lines in a minute.
Figure 14. Authentic examples of usage of "take a run"
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BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

The last thing I want to talk about with List is that you can look for variable slots in the phrases as well.
For example, if I use the phrase “go for a,” then I can put in an asterisk or a wild card which allows for it
to be a variable slot and find matching strings. I can see what types of words fill that variable slot.
Figure 15. Find matching strings with a variable slot
Here, we can see “go for a walk” is the most frequent, “go for a ride,” “go for a drive,“ “go for a swim,”
”go for a run,” so that earlier example of “go for a run” is frequent, but it’s not the most frequent. Here,
we can see how the phrase “go for a” and then a variable slot, how that’s used or what types of words fill
that variable slot. Okay, this is it for List. I think we’ll move on to the next one after that.
Figure 16. Frequency information for "go for a *"
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COCA: The KWIC Function
[The video can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/oib3IQjsKp0 ]
The next function that we’ll look at is KWIC (Key Word in Context) lines. KWIC is a useful function for
looking at the types of words that surround the target word, such as prepositions. Those are often difficult
for English language learners.
Figure 17. COCA KWIC function
Let’s take a look with our phrases from earlier that we used with the List function: “go for a run” versus
“take a run.” First, we’ll look at “go for a run,” and we’ll see what types of words occur around this phrase.
When we type “go for a run” or a word or a phrase into the search field, this will be represented here in
this middle area.

Figure 18. KWIC search for "go for a run"
Then, we can look for words that happen around it. If we click on these, then we’ll expand the number of
words that we can see around “go for a run.”
Figure 19. Expanding the number of words around "go for a run" in the search

If we click on KWIC here, after we put that in, this will give us our phrase and what’s happening around it.
This is interesting. We have “go.” That’s a verb, so that’s highlighted in pink. Then, we have “for” which is
a preposition, so that’ll be highlighted in yellow. Then, we have our article in gray, and then we have “run”
which is a verb or a noun, and the noun is highlighted in blue. If it occurs as a verb, then it will be
highlighted in pink. Here, we have “go for a run after breakfast,” “go for a run and a swim,” and “go for a
run anywhere.” Here, we can see we have a number of different types of words that follow the phrase
“go for a run.” We can have articles. We can have prepositions or any number of words, so that’s that.
Figure 20. KWIC lines for "go for a run"
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If we go back and we change “go for a run” to “take a run,” we might see some different patterns, so let’s
say we have “take a run” and we click KWIC, we’ll notice here that we have “take a run,” “run” occurring
as a noun. It’s highlighted in blue. Then, we have lots of prepositions. They’re highlighted in yellow, and
we see in particular the preposition “at,” so “take a run at North Carolina.” “Kerry says that he’ll take a
run at North Carolina.” This is probably talking about John Kerry and his presidential run. We can go back
over here to the context. This comes from a news program. We also have “take a run at Tampa Bay,” “take
a run at the whitetails,” “take a run at the White House.” We can see a lot of this stuff looks like it’s
representing an effort, like to try to achieve something. Here, we have “take a run at the White House,”
so this looks like probably “George Bush is waiting in the wings perhaps to take a run at the White House,”
meaning he will try to become President. Here, we can see differences between these two phrases by
using the KWIC function.

Figure 21. KWIC lines for "take a run"
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Again, KWIC doesn’t need to be used with phrases alone. It can be used with simple words as well, so if
we want to see, for example, just “run,” and let’s say we want to see “run” as it occurs just as a verb, we
can put that tag in there and then click on KWIC, and we’ll see what we get.
Figure 22. KWIC search for "run"

Here, we have “run” highlighted in pink just as a verb, and we can see that it’s followed by a preposition
sometimes. It’s followed by nouns sometimes and more prepositions. We can see the types of patterns
that occur around “run.”
Figure 23. KWIC lines for "run"
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360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
A possible activity you could do is you could have your students work in pairs. You can have them put in a
phrase like “take a run,” get rid of the POS tag, and then they can look at the patterns that are happening
around “take a run.” We saw earlier that “take a run” seems much more restrictive in terms of the type
of word that follows it, in particular prepositions and in particular just the preposition “at,” and then your
students can look at that, and they can take note of the patterns around “take a run.” Then, they can
compare it with “go for a run” or any two phrases that you want them to look at. Then, they can just look
through the data, and they can discover for themselves what types of patterns mark certain phrases and
differentiate them from other phrases or words.

COCA: The Collocates Function (Part 1)
[The video can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/oa5RY96101k ]
The next function that I want to look at is Collocates. This is one of my favorite functions in COCA.
Figure 24. COCA Collocates function
A collocate or collocation is when two words co-occur or occur together frequently or have a really strong
association with each other. To illustrate this, let’s look at our word “run” again. We put “run” in the word
or phrase field, and for the collocates that we want to look for, we’ll make that a wild card or an asterisk,
so we can see all the different words that collocate or co-occur with “run” in our corpus.

Figure 25. Find collocates for "run"
Down here in this bar, we can specify how many words away from “run” we want to allow this wild card
to occur. Let’s say that we want to capture all words that happen around three words after run and two
words before. We can click on Find Collocates, and then, we’ll see what we get.
Figure 26. Number of words away from "run" for wild card to occur

Here, we have some really strange results. I don’t really know what these mean, and I’m actually glad this
happened because a lot of times, you get strange results, and you’ll need to know how to deal with that.
What we can see over here is an MI. We have really high MI. Ten is a really high MI. We kind of want to
stick to MI around two or three or four.
Figure 27. Results with MI that is too high
This work is a derivative of "Results with high MI" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI
360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Let’s go back to Search and change some of the settings. If you have something like this, where you get
just a few words at a really high MI, or you get lots of words like prepositions and articles like “the,” “a,”
and “at,” and they have a really low MI, then you want to change some things. The way to do that is to go
down here to Sort/Limit, and you can click on this.

Figure 28. How to change MI
Now, we’ll see that Mutual Information (MI) is set at ten. That is too high. If you look over here on the
side, you can see that it should’ve automatically been set to three, but that doesn’t always happen, so
sometimes, you have to go in here manually and change it. MI is a measure of association between words,
so the higher the MI score, the stronger that association, but when you get really high scores, then you’re
just going to get low-frequency words that pretty much only occur with your target word, so I would
suggest a MI score of two or three like COCA suggests.
Figure 29. MI should not be set at ten

We’ll change this now, and we’ll click on “Find Collocates” again to see if our results look a little different.
Figure 30. Find collocates for "run," with MI of three
Good! These look much nicer, so we have things like “long,” “home,” “away,” and “short.” All these words
collocate or co-occur with “run.” We’ll see here that our MI scores are much more reasonable.
Figure 31. Collocates for "run"
This work is a derivative of "Search results for run" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by

Let’s try “long.” Let’s click on this and see what kind of context we get with “run.” Here, we have “the long
run,” “in the long run…” Look! We have lots of occurrences of this phrase “in the long run.” That’s good.
Now, we can see that “long” co-occurs a lot with “run,” and we can see some typical phrases like “in the
long run,” so this is a really interesting thing.
Figure 32. Wider context of "long" as collocate of "run"
This work is a derivative of "Long as a collocate of run" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0
We can use Collocates to find a phrase like “in the long run,” and then, we can actually take it back to the
List function and then just search the phrase “in the long run” that we just found through the Collocates
function and see what we find in List.

Figure 33. Find matching strings for "in the long run"
We have “in the long run” occurring 3,580 times. Interesting—so, it is a frequent phrase.
Figure 34. Frequency information for "in the long run"
This work is a derivative of "Frequency information for in the long run" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed

Let me see how it’s used in its wider context. Now, we have all the instances of “in the long run.”
Figure 35. Authentic examples of usage of "in the long run"
This work is a derivative of "Examples of usage of in the long run" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under
You can have your students find frequent collocates of “run,” find phrases that those collocates are
associated with, and then look them up in List to see the wider context.

COCA: The Collocates Function (Part 2)
[The video can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/y8LachU909I ]
Now, I want to go back to the Collocates function, so I go back here to Collocates. I’ll put my search “run”
back in, and I want to look at how the word “run” occurs as, let’s say, a verb, so I’m going to add the POS
tag Verb. I have “run” as a verb and its collocates.
Figure 36. Find collocates for "run" as a verb
I want to look at how “run” occurs as a verb in different registers or different types of writing, so if I click
on Sections here, I can get different registers.

Figure 37. Find collocates of "run" as a verb in different registers
I can see that I can look at “run” as it occurs in academic writing, and I can look at “run” as it occurs in
Spoken.
Figure 38. Find collocates of "run" as a verb in academic and spoken registers

Here, I think I will organize in terms of Mutual Information (MI), so I think I’ll go with MI scores of three
for each one. and then I can click find collocates and I’ll see what types of words collocate with “run” as a
verb in academic texts and what types of words collocate with “run” in the spoken section of COCA.
Figure 39. Organize search by MI
Here, we have the Academic side, and then, we can see that we have words like “model,” “using,” and
“experiments,” so maybe in these texts, we’re seeing things like “run an experiment” or “run a model” or
“parallel runs.” Then, if we look over here in the Spoken side, Spoken actually usually comes from news
programs that are from TV, so here, we’ll see things like “president,” “senate,” and “‘VE,” so maybe here,
we’re going to say “run for president” or “a candidate is going to run for senate,” so we can see a different
use of the word “run” in the Spoken section versus how “run” is used in academic writing.

Figure 40. Collocates of "run" as a verb in Academic versus Spoken
This work is a derivative of "Collocates of run as verb in academic and spoken context" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative
is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
I’m kind of curious about this “‘VE,” so let’s take a look at what’s happening here. I’ll click on that, and
we’re seeing “I’ve never run into anyone,” “I’ve previously run,” and “You’ve just run off the road,” so we
can see that “run” is often used with the present participle. That’s interesting.
Figure 41. 'VE as collocate of "run" as a verb
This work is a derivative of "ve as colloqate of run as a verb" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY
4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

One activity that you can have your students do is you can have them look for any word such as “run” or
any other word that you want them to look for. You can have them search that word in its common
collocates in two different registers and note the difference of how that word is used depending on the
different register or the different type of writing or the different type of speaking that that word happens
in.

COCA: The Compare Function
[The video can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/5RT7EpMdhEM ]
The next function that I want to look at is the Compare function. This is a really good function when you
want to look at two words that are similar like synonyms but see how they are used differently.
Figure 42. COCA Compare function
A classic example will be “big” and “large.” If I type down the word “big,” then I type in the word “large,”
and then, I put in my wild card for collocates, I can click Compare Words and see what types of words
collocate with “big” and “large.” Let’s check the settings real quick to make sure stuff is set well. We’re
looking at Frequency. Let’s change that to Mutual Information. We’ll change that to three as we said
earlier. That will be nice. We’ll Compare Words like this, so here, we’ll see what “big” collocates with
compared to what “large” collocates with.

Figure 43. Compare Words "big" and "large" with MI of three
Here, we have “big,” and here, we have “large.” With “big,” we have things like “big brother,” “big
surprise,” “big bang,” “big sister,” “big deal,” and “big trouble.” With “large,” we have “large extent,”
“large skillet,” “large quantities,” “large pepper,” and “large clothes.” Just by looking at these, my first
intuition would be that “big” maybe occurs more in a metaphorical sense, while “large” occurs more in a
literal sense like an actual large skillet or a large pepper. Meanwhile, we have things like “big trouble.”
That’s not actually physical size but more the idea or the metaphor of degree of trouble.
Figure 44. Comparison of "big" and "large"
This work is a derivative of "Comparison of big and large" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Another thing we could do is we could look at, for example, our favorite example of “run.” What’s a
synonym of “run”? Jog, so “go for a run,” and we can also say “go for a jog.” Let’s look at “jog.” How are
those two words different? Two words, even if they’re synonyms, are always going to be used a little bit
differently.
Figure 45. Compare Words "run" and "jog"
Here, we have “the long run” again, and then, in “jog,” we have “memory” and “memories,” so things like
“memory” are happening a lot with “jog.”
Figure 46. Comparison of "run" and "jog"
This work is a derivative of "Comparison of run and jog" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Let’s see what’s happening there. We’ll click on one of these and see what we get.
Figure 47. Exploring authentic examples of "memory" as a collocate of "jog"
This work is a derivative of "Authentic examples of memory as a collocate of jog" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is
licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Here, we have “jog my memory” and “jog your memory,” so “to jog my memory, I made a fist of my right
hand and held it up” and “he had information that would have helped jog my memory.” We can see that
we have a phrase here like “jog” and then “my” or “your” or a pronoun and then “memory.” This will help
us to search this. We can search this in Google. We can try to figure out what “jog your memory” means
just based on these things or do different searches, but the important thing is that we found a nice phrase
with “jog” and “memory” to see how these work in natural language. These are the types of searches you
can do with Compare.

Figure 48. Authentic examples of usage of "jog my/your memory"
This work is a derivative of "Authentic examples of usage of jog my/your memory" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative
is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Activity ideas for your students might be to have them look at two synonyms like “big” and “large” or
“jog” and “run” and then look at the types of collocates that those words occur with and try to generate
some rules or some patterns, e.g. how does “large” function differently than “big” when you look at the
words in context using the Compare function?

COCA: The Chart Function
[The video can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/VOZqgNHH0i0 ]
The last function for COCA that I want to look at is the Chart function. Earlier, we saw how you could
compare a word or a phrase in the different sections of COCA such as academic writing versus the spoken
part of the corpus. Chart does something similar, where we can enter a word or a phrase, and we can see
immediately across all the different registers or sections of COCA how frequent that word or phrase is.
Figure 49. COCA Chart function
Let’s try with the word “experiment.” We have our Sort/Limit open here. We want to sort by Mutual
Information. Again, three is nice. We’re using only one word, so this side isn’t necessary, just that side.

Figure 50. Sort/Limit settings for Chart function
We’ll put See Frequency by Section and see what we get with the word “experiment.”
Figure 51. See frequency by section for "experiment"

There you go. We can see the word “experiment” happens in all the different sections of COCA, and our
little histogram, our little bar graphs over here tell us how frequent it is. Just at a glance, we can see that
the word “experiment” is most frequent in Academic.
Figure 52. Frequency histograms for "experiment"
This work is a derivative of "Frequency histograms for experiment" by Corpus of Contemporary American English. This derivative is licensed under
We can click on that and get some more information of the different sub-sections of Academic and how
frequent that word is.
Figure 53. Frequency information for "experiment" in sub-sections of Academic
This work is a derivative of "Frequency information for experiment in sub-sections of Academic" by Corpus of Contemporary American English.
This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

That’s one thing that you can have your students do. When they look at a word or a phrase, it’s always
important to know what register that word or phrase is used in, so that can be an activity where if your
students have a word or a phrase, the first step is to say, “Okay. What register is this word or phrase
typically used in, or where is it most commonly used?” Then, from there, you can search for different
collocates and then beyond, looking at how words compare with one another or patterns in the KWIC
lines and then to the List function to look at the wider context and just see exact strings of words. There’s
a lot that can be done in COCA.
One last thing that I want to stress is yes, you can have your students interact directly with COCA, but also,
as a teacher, you can use COCA to help you prepare materials. If you want your students to look at how
“big” and “large” are used, you don’t have to let them go directly to the corpus; you as the teacher can
use the corpus to help inform materials that you make. A lot of times, that’s better for students, as just
letting them loose directly into the corpus might be overwhelming if they’re not trained well. I encourage
you to use COCA. It has a lot of potential and a lot of power. Your students can interact directly with the
interface, or you can use COCA to help inform your own teaching materials that you make.
Some FAQs About Using COCA
Do I need to create an account to use COCA? You don't have to create an account to use COCA.
However, after you have done a few searches, you will be asked to create an account. You
might go ahead and do this right away. It’s free, and it gives you access to the whole corpus
(though with a limit of 50 searches per day). Then you should log in before you start searching.
Do I need to register to use COCA? You do not need to register as a "researcher" to use the
corpora. Even the lowest level, default "non-researcher" status gives you 50 queries a day, or
about 1,500 queries per month. For most people, this is more than enough. On the other hand,
if you really do need more than 1,500 queries per month, then you might want to upgrade to a
premium account, which also helps to support the corpora, in which case you will have 200
queries a day (6,000 per month).
How could I learn more about the features in the COCA website? Please use the help page
(with the question icon) of the website to learn about the available features.


Summary
Finishing Up Week 4
The focus of Module 4 was to look at technology tools for learning and teaching vocabulary and
grammar. We hope that you have discovered some technologies that can help you to teach
certain aspects of these skills. Remember: When you incorporate technology, you should take
"baby steps". Learning a language is already cognitively taxing, so remember as you incorporate
technology to move incrementally and to have as a goal the incorporation of sustainable
resources.
Looking Ahead
In the final week, we will be ending the course with a discussion of technology integration. As
you are getting ready for Week 5, think about what you have learned so far and consider the
following questions:
• What are some of the opportunities you see when it comes to integrating technology in
your context?
• What are some of the main concerns you have when it comes to integrating technology?
• What do you think would be the two or three most important aspects you need help with
so you can integrate technology into your teaching?


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Technology for Teaching

Vocabulary and Technology .......................................................................................................... 5

Introduction to Vocabulary and Technology................................................................................. 6

Exploring Technology Tools for Vocabulary ................................................................................ 27

Discussion: Using Technology to Teach Vocabulary ................................................................... 29

Grammar and Technology ........................................................................................................... 30

Teaching Grammar Using Technology ......................................................................................... 31

Grammar Teaching Resources ............................................................................................. 47

Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English .......................................................... 48

COCA: The List Function ............................................................................................................. 49

COCA: The KWIC Function ......................................................................................................... 58

COCA: The Collocates Function (Part 1)..................................................................................... 63

COCA: The Collocates Function (Part 2)..................................................................................... 71

COCA: The Compare Function ................................................................................................... 76

COCA: The Chart Function ......................................................................................................... 81

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Vocabulary & Technology

• Watch the lecture: Introduction to Vocabulary and Technology. (40 minutes)

Grammar and Technology

• Watch the lecture: Teaching Grammar Using Technology. (45 minutes)

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After this section you will have...

• Met our vocabulary expert, Professor James Ranalli

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[The video can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlE2-

Slide 3. The technology-vocabulary connection.

Slide 4. This page called News Words is one

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Watch the story at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EO9gzw7Qzc

“Changing Presidents…” story

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“Changing Presidents…” text

Slide 9. Following the story there is a list of those

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Slide 21. For Example. For example, let’s take a look at

Slide 22. “Obliterated” means “beat” but how do

Slide 23. We need to see examples. We really need to

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Slide 24. COCA. Those examples of the word “obliterated” in many

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Slide 33. Online fandom. Fans have been

Slide 34. Within these online fandoms, fans

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Slide 38. Sherlock. One such recent and extremely popular

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Slide 40. At the time she entered fandom, Steevee was

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Slide 45. Steevee’s original motivation for becoming involved in London

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The New York Times

Lingro view of article

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