Collins Cobuild English Course 1

[sayuri]

May I ask in what way exactly was it fine? Did you find the books easy to follow? Did any of your students feel a sense of sensory and cognitive overload?
I am curious becasue I have used Book 1 once and am re-evaluating its potential for future use. I found it quite difficult to use, one because I had never used anything based on a lexical syllabus, corpus linguistics and task based methodology. Secondly I did not even know of those terms till recently!!
Did you have to adapt the units at all?

[hendan]

Hi,I new, what's up?

[sayuri]

just trying to finish an essay,
are you new to the forum too?

[Tdol]

It was quite a while ago, so I'm going from memory. At the time, it seemed fairly fresh and lexis was all the rage and it had a halo effect- the 'real Englisah' it was teaching seemed promising. However, despite the efforts of Cobuild, Michael Lewis, etc, corpus based learning hasn't really taken off. There are excellent tools available, like http://view.byu.edu/, there hasn't been much take-up in teaching, and generally the ideas have met with a lot of apathy, so some continue to plug them. The impact that Cobuild had on lexicography has not been mirrored in the classroom, I'm afraid. In my experience, only a small number of my students have really got into it.

[sayuri]

Thanks for your comment. I am getting the feeling that as you say, although there was innovation in the lexical approach it hasn't inspired people to change their ways.
I see that your location is Tokyo. May I ask where? I lived there for nine years.

[sayuri]

Oh
Happy Birthday (belated) tdol !!!!!
And thank you again for replying to my questions.

[Tdol]

There was innovation- the Cobuild dictionaries had a major impact on both dictionaries and the way we see language, but that failed to move over. How many teachers are regularly using concordancers? I suspect it would be a pretty low figure worldwide, which is a shame because there is a lot to be had from them.



PS I'm in Ningyocho.

[sayuri]

Ningyo-cho.....do you like it?
I agree about concordancers....and that is only a recent thought of mine as I had no idea of concordancers and what they were or their implications before.
Perhaps the other problem is the lack of broader range of focus when looking at materials during teacher training. If people knew about it, or more about it then maybe there would be more people using it....and I do not mean in just the western teaching context.

By the way I got your reply about keeping to a single thread in the forum. Sorry! How can I get rid of that other thread?