Irene's+resources

                 The first resource that I will take is **//Longman Grammar of Written and Spoken English//**. It is a corpus-based grammar reference for teachers to inform their teaching. The book illustrates English grammar in a descriptive approach where teachers could check for the word frequency (i.e. how common the words are used generally), grammatical structures and collocations in a specific context or genre. With this tool book, it aids me easily tell my students the difference of word use with authentic examples from spoken conversations, literature, academia, and news in the U.K or the U.S. The formality of words and some stereotypic variations between British English and American English are also shown through the corpus data. Hence, not only I can review my own English knowledge but my students can also start to learn analyzing the language they come across in daily life. It is helpful for them to use the appropriate structures in the proper production mode in the long run.  I found this book particularly useful as I am an ESL learner who was taught with prescriptive grammar. It helps me with more solid ground reference and confidence for using certain words in different modes or registers, getting a clearer picture of using English words with CAL (cognitive academic learning) or BIC (basic informal communication) purpose, and hence I think it can also be helpful for my students.  When teaching certain structures or words, apart from using the book as a reference, I might show the authentic corpus examples after students have been exposed to the structures or words for some time, instead of giving any prescriptive rules or explanations first. Those exposure above might be viewing a video extract, hearing me reading aloud some of my (fabricated or real) personal stories, or the assignments I give to them before. In this way, with the help of the corpus reference, I hope they are not rote-learning rules by memorization but understanding the usage in a communicative aspect.  -  Another resource that I will take with me is the following website: [] Though the intended students group is not high school adolescents, I think it is still a quite resourceful website with worksheets, and examples of different teaching ideas that I discovered only after I reached Canada for this immersion semester. I found it very useful as it outlines the procedures for enacting and putting ideas from theory into real practice, which could be a very good reference for me as a novice teacher. I will definitely use the site to help me design my lessons as it provides quite a number of exemplars with video showing both the teaching process and the class response  Irene