Categorization of Activities Used in English as a foreign Language: A Corpus Based Study with Pedagogical Materials

All the didactic materials used for teaching EFL have a certain potential for learning. On the one hand, there are those activities focused on the learning of forms, which are likely to foster the explicit learning of language. On the other hand, there are activities focused on the content, more aimed at the comprehension of the communicative message and the implicit learning of language. Selecting the appropriate activities to promote a balanced learning of EFL is paramount; however, the increasing number of teaching materials today makes it more difficult for EFL teachers to get to know the learning potential of all the resources available to them. For this particular end, the present study is an attempt to categorize a large compilation of EFL activities with the help of an activity corpus. Each individual activity was analysed with regard to its language focus and labelled accordingly.