Pavlína Vališová is attached to the Centre for Corpus Research on a five month Erasmus Student Mobility of Placement traineeship. She arrived in Birmingham in early February 2011.

During her stay in Birmingham, she has been developing a set of concordance-based worksheets for use in the teaching of Czech as a second language. There have been several studies looking at how corpus data can be used in the teaching of English as a foreign language but to date there has been very little investigation of the potential for using concordance-based language learning activities with learners of Czech. Czech is a highly inflected language and therefore presents different challenges for corpus investigation, and this is the main focus of Pavlína’s work.

She has designed several worksheets that focus on morphological features of Czech and she is now testing the worksheets. She has asked friends in the Czech Republic to trial the worksheets in their Czech as a Foreign Language classes, and then, in the light of the feedback, she then revises the worksheets.

She chose Birmingham as the place to do her traineeship because of the university’s strong reputation as a centre for using corpus resources in language teaching.

 

About Pavlína

She is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Czech Language at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Her PhD study is in the field of teaching Czech as a foreign language, focusing on the use of corpus resources in teaching Czech. Her Ph.D. research is focused on problematical areas, which non-native speakers usually have difficulty with when learning Czech grammar – doublets and variants in Czech declension and conjugation.