A Study on the Use of Prepositions mediated by an ICT Tool

Abstract

This paper describes how an English language teacher from a primary school in Singapore employed an ICT tool to understand the use of prepositions amongst nine-year-old children. Using the written composition of 28 primary three pupils in a Modular lesson that she has taught, the teacher created a learner corpus, named it CLAL (Corpus-based Learning about Language), and used Ant Conc, a corpus analysis technology, to identify patterns in her pupils’ usage of prepositions, ‘in’, ‘on’ and ‘at’. Drawing from the preliminary findings, the teacher then attempted to adopt the data-driven learning (DDL) approach in the teaching of grammar, harnessing on similar technology. She concludes by showing two angles in which Ant Conc could be used in classrooms.