Corpus analysis of primary one science textbooks for designing ELT materials
To make use of words or lists of words in various forms for various purposes is not new. We have been using lists of vocabulary words for tourists and students from various levels of education in the form of glossaries, lists of jargons, indexes and the like. Such lists are called corpus.The gov...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Book Section |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit UTM
2008
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/18932/1/SarimahShamsudin2008_CorpusAnalysisofPrimaryOneScience.pdf http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/18932/ |
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| Summary: | To make use of words or lists of words in various forms for various
purposes is not new. We have been using lists of vocabulary words
for tourists and students from various levels of education in the form
of glossaries, lists of jargons, indexes and the like. Such lists are
called corpus.The government’s recent policy on the teaching of Science in
English calls for a fundamental support from language practitioners and researchers of these fields. Here, we highlights some important issues regarding the use of English as the medium of instruction for
the teaching and learning of Science in primary schools. Among
others, the language issue related to the lexical, syntactic and
semantic patterns of English in Science and Technology (EST)
has been ‘under-researched’. This, therefore, sets the focus of our
study which undertakes to examine the language patterns existing
in science authentic texts. Among the many conventional methods
that can be adopted, such as functional-notional @ communicative
method (Wilkins, 1976), structural @grammar approach (Chomsky,
1965), procedural approach (Prabhu, 1987) or instrospective and retrospective methods (Pressley and Afflerbach, 1995) which often times are limited and unsystematic, we propose to employ the method
which involves the making of corpus of this subject area using
lexical approach (Lewis, 1994). The lexical approach (Lewis, 1993;
Willis, 1990, Willis & Willis, 1988, 1989) is chosen for a number of
reasons: 1) it emphasises on the importance of co-text (i.e. language
is not de-contextualised), 2) it provides a range of awareness-raising
activities that direct the learner’s attention to chunks text composed,
3) it focuses on different forms of lexical item. The corpus produced
can then be used by other researchers in this area for teaching and
learning purposes.
In this paper, we will discuss the preliminary stage of an ongoing research which aims to design teaching and learning materials
through an analysis of a corpus of texts taken from Science textbooks
for Primary One students in Malaysia. The topic of our research is
‘EST Teaching and Learning Materials via WWW Based on Corpus
Analysis of Mathematics, Science and English Text Books in
Malaysian Primary Schools’. This paper, however, only focuses on
the use of the frequency list and corpus of Science texts to develop
teaching and learning materials for English language learners of
Primary One students. |
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