Please join us for a special full-day workshop with Evan Frendo:
Corpus analysis software is now easily available and can be extremely useful to the business English teacher. In this six-hour workshop we will look at how such software can be exploited to create teaching materials and activities which really target the language our learners need. The workshop is designed as an introduction to the topic, and no previous experience is necessary.
Specifically, the day will be divided into the following sessions.
0900 -1000 An introduction to corpus linguistics. We will explore what is meant by terms like corpus, concordance, frequency, collocation and keyword, and look at examples of how researchers have used corpus linguistics to investigate business English, specifically the language of meetings and the language of relationship building.
1000-1015 Coffee.
1015-1100 Using online corpora. We will look at examples of popular online corpora and associated corpus analysis tools, including Sketch Engine for Language Learning (SKELL), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE), and discuss how such resources might best be exploited in a business English class.
1100-1200 Corpus design. We will examine a company specific email corpus (Enron), and use corpus analysis tools to investigate the type of email language business English learners might need.
1200-1300 Lunch.
1300-1415 Teaching activities. We will look at different types of business English activities and teaching materials which we can produce using corpus analysis software.
1400-1415 Coffee.
1415-1600 Hands-on practice. We will create our own corpora and activities for use in our own business English classrooms.
- Places will be limited to first come first served. There are only 12 places available.
- Each participant will need to bring a laptop to the workshop. Joining instructions with further details will be sent to each successful applicant.
- The fee for the workshop is €50.
Time: April 27, 2019 from 9am to 4pm
Location: TH Wildau
Address: Hochschulring 1, 15745 Wildau
Registration: To register for this workshop, please write to events@eltabb.com
Evan is a freelance trainer, teacher trainer and author based in Berlin, and has been active in Business English and English for Specific Purposes since 1993, mostly in the corporate sector. A frequent speaker at conferences, he also travels regularly in Europe and Asia to run courses or to work as a consultant. Using corpus analysis tools has been a fundamental part of this work. You can find out more about who he is and what he does at www.e4b.de