TESOL 2017: The COCA and corpus-based instruction

From the first time I learned about them, corpora and concordances have been a guilty pleasure of mine. Corpus-based instruction holds out the promise that we can teach vocabulary based on how the words and phrases are actually used in the real world as opposed to the over-simplified world of vocabulary lists and dictionaries.

Therefore, I was eager to attend the following presentation at TESOL in Seattle in March:  "Corpus 101: Navigating the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)," presented by Heather Gregg Zitlau, Heather Weger, and Kelly Hill Zirker.

The presentation consisted of a general introduction to corpus-based instruction, an introduction to COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, one of the most authoritative corpora in current use, as well as a guide to using the COCA and its associated app, Word And Phrase, for classroom instruction.

The following Powerpoint presentation from the TESOL presentation deals with the following topics:

1. An introduction to the use of corpora in language teaching;
2. An introduction to COCA, and uses that it can be put to in the classroom, and
3. An introduction to Word And Phrase, an app which is based on COCA, and which can be used for a number of classroom activities for advanced vocabulary development.

https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/david.ross/profdev-avatar/tesol-2017/corpus-101-navigating-the-corpus-of-contemporary-american-english-coca/view

here is the link to COCA itself:
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

And here is the link to Word And Phrase:
http://www.wordandphrase.info/