The Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies (LML) of The Education University of Hong Kong has a Corpus-Aided Platform for Language Teachers (CAP).

I was greatly inspired by the resources provided by the platform, as well as Dr Angel Ma and her team, who gave me a lot of support when I designed my corpus-based English language teaching lesson.

I’m going to put the lesson design into practice on Friday evening, teaching students to move away from expressions influenced by their mother tongue (i.e. Cantonese/Chinese) when they display attitudes in their topic, such as

? People are difficult to find out the reasons behind… as opposed to
It is difficult for people to find out… or
People find it difficult to find out…

The class will use the Corpus of Contemporary American English to tease out the sentence patterns commonly used in authentic texts, in addition to the adjectives usually collocating with these patterns to make comments in formal writing.

I believe soon LML will release my lesson design on CAP. I’ll update how things go after Friday’s lesson.