Workshops
Designing Pedagogical Materials Using Interactive Data-driven Learning (iDDL) with Multilingual Learner Corpora
July, 2020
Pre-conference workshop held for the Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC). Perpignan, France (online).
Workshop facilitators: Aleksey Novikov, Adriana Picoral, Bruna Sommer-Farias, Ola Swatek, Ashley Velazquez, and Shelley Staples
This half-day pre-conference workshop was dedicated to teachers and researchers working in foreign/second language instruction. We invited participants who would like to broaden their knowledge and use of a new innovative approach to Data-Driven Learning (DDL), which we call interactive Data-driven Learning (iDDL). Interactive Data-driven Learning (iDDL) is a new function of a suite of learner corpora that we provide. More specifically, iDDL is a dynamic way of integrating concordance lines in a scrollbar format into online pedagogical materials using learning management systems (e.g. Moodle, etc) or any other online platforms that support embedding (e.g. Google sites). Along with the window containing concordance lines, the instructor can add questions to scaffold students' noticing patterns.
First, we started our workshop with a brief description of the suite of learner corpora used in the workshop, namely an English first and second language writing corpus and a multilingual learner corpus of Portuguese and Russian. After this introduction to the corpora, participants were presented with pre-made iDDL pedagogical materials in respective languages. The second and more extensive part of the workshop engaged the participants in a series of hands-on activities. These activities focused on 1) performing pedagogically-driven corpus searches; 2) appropriating available corpus texts and affordances for specific pedagogical purposes, such as selecting specific genres, topics, learner metadata (e.g., country of origin, and standardized exam scores, draft, mode of assignment, and L1); 3) embedding concordance lines into Moodle or Google sites.
In the final stage of the workshop, participants worked in pairs or small groups to develop iDDL materials for their own classroom context.
Teacher Training Sessions
March 10, 2020
During the Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 semester, the MACAWS team held four face-to-face teacher training sessions for instructions in the Portuguese and Russian language programs. The first workshop series started with an overview of the project and the MACAWS online interface. Language teachers were guided through a few corpus searchers, including step-by-step instructions on how to perform multi-word searches and how to filter search results.
In both workshops, participants created their own iDDL activities based on their corpus search results. The language instructors embedded corpus data into activities on a shared D2L, the course management system adopted by University of Arizona. The goal was to show teachers how they can easily incorporate iDDL into their online lessons. Also, the workshop shared D2L works as a collaborative repository for activities, that can then be copied to the instructors' individual D2L course shells.
Here's an example of an activity on possessive determiners in Portuguese that incorporates iDDL:
And here's an activity on Russian 'study' verbs that also incorporates iDDL:
For full access to these and more activities, check out our iDDL page.