Various claims have been made in the educational literature about the relative merits of pair and group activities in classrooms. With the shift in language teaching towards a more learner-centred approach, however, there is now a stronger emphasis on the views of learners themselves. One hundred and three Brazilian EFL students (beginners, elementary, intermediate) completed and then evaluated different types of learning activities: teacher-fronted grammar (TFG), student-centred grammar (SCG), teacher-fronted fluency (TFF) and student-centred fluency (SCF). They were asked to evaluate these in terms of affective reactions (enjoyment, anxiety) and perceived learning value, by completing 5-point scales and writing reasons for their ratings. There were some significant differences among the different levels of students. Beginners saw TFG as better for learning than SCG. Intermediates saw TFG as less fun. The same groups also viewed SCF as more fun and more relaxing than TFF, though neither of them perceived any difference in learning outcomes. Elementary learners felt TFF was better for learning than SCF, but saw no difference between them when it came to enjoyment and relaxation. These findings are discussed alongside the reasons the learners gave for their ratings.
Corpus linguists have argued that corpora allow us to present lexical and grammatical patterns to language learners as they occur in real language, thereby exposing the learner to authentic target language (Mindt, 1996; Biber et al., 2002; Sinclair, 2004). And there is now a growing body of empirical research into how corpus studies can benefit ELT materials design and development (Ljung, 1990, 1991; Römer, 2004, 2005). This study investigates how the present perfect is represented in a spoken corpus and in ELT textbooks. The objective is to see whether corpus frequency data can make textbook present perfect presentation represent reality more accurately, and also whether there are sometimes pedagogic aims that may override frequency considerations. Results show that textbooks fail to represent adequately how present perfect interacts with other verb forms to create hybrid tenses such the present perfect passive. Textbooks also over-represent the frequency of structures such as the present perfect continuous. Adverbs such as yet and already are much more frequent in textbooks than in the corpus. Textbook writers seem to deliberately exaggerate the frequency of such adverbs, and arguably use them as tense markers or flagging devices so that learners will expect to see present perfect when they see yet and already. This suggests that disregard for natural frequency data may be justifiable if pedagogic considerations of this kind are taken into account. So, while corpus data provides important and useful frequency data for the teaching of grammar, pedagogic objectives may sometimes require that frequency data is disregarded.
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