Unit 1 - example lesson

The following are some excepts from a data-driven lesson:

An example handout

Study the following set of lines from the corpus. What does it tell you about the word ‘lobster’?

o it yourself" shish kebob or a LOBSTER roast. Then you'll want terry

ers may be significant. Adult   LOBSTERs use their claws to cruch sh

ow low water mark, predation by LOBSTERs may be significant. Adult lo

ent to us was a beautiful large LOBSTER he and one of the boys had br

he Mate, who had eaten too much LOBSTER too fast. And the Captain, af

 wished he hadn't eaten so much LOBSTER for lunch. But they all tight

iner ships and brightly painted LOBSTER boats than the port of Miami.

hen they went to pull up their  LOBSTER pots. Rev. Dr. Leslie D. Weat

 for that! Waiter! Waiter! This LOBSTER has only one claw! Oh, it mus

Lobster is countable and uncountable
- uncountable when a food, countable when alive and kicking…
Lobster as a noun can be used adjectivally
- as in the compounds lobster roast, lobster pots, lobster boats.
Lobsters have claws… They can use their claws to crush (shells).
Other collocates include adjectives: large, adult, and the verb: eat…
We can grill or roast a lobster.

Students are assigned one of the following words: "set", "run", "pay" and "foot".
Each student has 10 minutes to figure out as many meanings as possible for his/her word.
Students swap words and have another 10 minutes to find the meanings for collocations with as many of the following particles as possible: "out", "down", "back", "up".
Students are then given a list of KWICs [keywords in context, as in the above example] with the keywords missing - and perhaps also particles to the left and right, to make it more challenging. They discuss in groups of 4 (one searcher for each of the above words) which words belong in the spaces based on their searches.