We have offered webinars to share with teachers and researchers ways to navigate the MACAWS online interface as well as how to use the data for teaching purposes. On this page you find information about webinars, recorded sessions, and materials used in each event.
If you're interested in short videos on specific topics, such as "culture", "genre" and "lexico-grammar", access out asynchronous webinar series with examples for both Russian and Portuguese classes: Asynchronous MACAWS Webinar, sponsored by The Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL).
March, 2025
Sommer-Farias, B. (2025, March). From words to worlds: Genre pedagogies and corpus tools to foster critical language awareness [webinar]. University of Arizona.
Critical approaches to language teaching propose the development of communicative abilities along with critical thinking, cultural understanding and learner agency. By embracing text-oriented instruction such as multiliteracies and genre pedagogies, educators can create pathways for students to discover connections between linguistic patterns and the complex sociocultural and sociopolitical landscapes in which languages operate (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). This talk offers concrete pedagogical strategies for fostering critical language awareness to support a learner- and text-centered approach to language teaching using genre pedagogies and corpus tools (Tardy et al., 2020; Staples et al., in press). The talk also creates space for educators to examine their own roles as facilitators of social change when creating learning experiences that help students not only interpret linguistic forms but also develop the metacognitive abilities to recognize, critique, and potentially reshape the social realities constructed through language.
October, 2024
Staples, S. (2024, October). Teacher knowledge and corpus-informed language teaching. Invited talk for the Corpus Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Research Webinar Series, University of Murcia, Spain (online).
View the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0SyvWLdYxU
Corpus linguistics has had an increasing impact on language teaching in the last 20 years, including the incorporation of corpus-informed methods in new textbook series for language teaching classrooms, and a proliferation of studies that illustrate the impact of using data-driven learning in language teaching classrooms (Boulton & Cobb, 2017; Boulton & Vyatkina, 2021). However, we know that uptake of corpus-informed instruction is still limited. To better address teachers’ needs, it is important to investigate the complexities of teacher knowledge required to enact this instruction. A growing number of studies have used a framework from technology-enhanced language teaching (TPACK, Mishra & Koehler, 2006; Koehler et al., 2014) to understand teacher knowledge and its development, primarily in ESL and EFL settings (Crosthwaite et al., 2021; Farr & O’Keefe, 2019; Ma et al., 2021, 2022; Schmidt, 2022). This talk will use the TPACK framework to explore teacher knowledge in three instructional environments: college level writing instruction (for English L2 and L1 writers), college level foreign language instruction (Portuguese and Russian), and English for Medical Purposes (for in-service internationally educated nurses).
September, 2024
In September 2024, the MACAWS team gave a webinar for the California TESOL (CATESOL) Research Interest Group. The webinar introduced the MACAWS corpus and gave an overview of an asset-based approach to learner corpora.
The activities introduced in this workshop are available in the following links:
April, 2024
Language corpora can be successfully used for creating pedagogical materials in various contexts and languages. However, engaging with texts from native-speaker corpora can be daunting for language learners. Learner corpora, corpora built from learner texts, can help fill the gap by providing level-appropriate materials. In addition, using learner language helps validate learner language as a legitimate variety.
This workshop will introduce the Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech, an open source learner corpus of Russian and Portuguese. Participants will be introduced to the benefits of using corpora in the language classroom, learn to navigate the MACAWS interface, gain access to existing corpus materials, and brainstorm how they can use our materials or create their own corpus-based activities. While the workshop focuses on teaching Russian and Portuguese, participants will gain insight for the teaching of other languages using a learner corpus approach.
The activities introduced in this workshop are available in the following links:
Sommer-Farias, B., & Centanin-Bertho, M. (2023, February). MACAWS - The creation of assignments with a learner corpus . UFRGS 2023 (online).
This presentation introduced MACAWS to instructors of Portuguese as an additional language from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. After being introduced to the corpus and the concepts of data-driven learning, attendees could navigate the corpus and discuss possible uses of that resources for the courses they teach.
September, 2022
In the summer of 2022, the MACAWS team developed a teaching demo showcasing the implementation of iDDL in the language classroom. This demo provides lesson objectives as well as a detailed lesson plan with warm-up, iDDL, and follow-up activities. Furthermore, it explains step-by-step how iDDL activites can be introduced and carried out in the classroom using clips from a recorded language class.
In this video, you will learn how to use our corpus-based activities in your classroom using a MACAWS corpus-based activity developed for a second-year Russian course.
You can find the iDDL activity on verbs of position demonstrated in this video here:
June, 2021
Information on CERCLL's Page: https://cercll.arizona.edu/event/macawswebinar2021/
Participants in this free and live webinar explored the Multilingual Academic Corpus of Assignments – Writing and Speech (MACAWS). Following the premise that language is highly patterned, participants learned how to create digital pedagogical materials using interactive Data-driven Learning (iDDL) to inductively guide students to discover language patterns. Participants were guided through a hands-on experience on how to embed MACAWS searches to their activities and how to integrate iDDL with other available technologies, such as forms, websites, and collaborative boards. The recording, available on Youtube, is also embedded below:
The activities introduced in this workshop are available in the following links:
Staples, S. (2021, February). Using corpora for pedagogy and research: Projects from the Corpus and Technology Enhanced Language Learning Lab. Invited talk at Michigan State University (online).
In this talk, I will provide an overview of ongoing projects in the Corpus and TELL Lab at University of Arizona, including an introduction to the two learner corpora we are developing, the Corpus and Repository of Writing (Crow), and Multilingual Corpus of Assignments: Writing and Speech (MACAWS). For both corpora, I will discuss both research and pedagogical applications that we are exploring. Both corpora are freely available to the public and access information will be provided for participants’ future exploration.
May, 2020
Information on CERCLL's Page: https://cercll.arizona.edu/event/webinar-macaws/
On May 18, 2020, the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL) hosted a webinar presented by our MACAWS team: Mariana Centanin Bertho, Aleksey Novikov, Adriana Picoral, Bruna Sommer-Farias, and Shelley Staples.
During this webinar, our participants learned to:
navigate MACAWS for linguistic and/or rhetorical features relevant to their teaching context;
implement Data-driven Learning (DDL) principles for inductive learning;
develop iDDL pedagogical materials for their instructional contexts.
We had a great time sharing materials and discussing affordances of MACAWS and iDDL with 148 participants from 50 institutions! Thank you for all who participated!
2019, Watch on Youtube
This webinar series presents and explains pedagogical materials created using MACAWS on the following topics:
Genre and Register Awareness
Lexico-grammar
Culture
The first two webinar videos briefly describe the corpus (Part I) and present the framework that guided the design of the materials
We are grateful for the support CERCLL has provided to our project. MACAWS was funded first by a CERCLL Faculty Fellow Research grant, and subsequently by CERCLL’s Title VI Language Resource Center grant and the University of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.