Teaching High School English - Collocations and Chunking
Integrated translation and LLM assistance to enhance learning outcomes. The students loved it! (2023)
This is a final project for Translation & Foreign Language Teaching, Spring 2023.
After the Grammar Translation Method (GTM) gained a bad reputation, translation has often been viewed as a hindrance in L2 learning, leading to its avoidance in pedagogy. However, translation is a natural process when expressing ourselves in multiple languages — it’s unavoidable! The shortcomings of previous pedagogical approaches to translation can be overcome with a well-designed course plan and the right perspective on translation.
Our course plan centered around the concept of chunking and collocation, helping students use learned phrases more effectively. The plan combined a warm-up activity that focused on translation in college admission tests, a sight-translation variant, and discussions about language learning tips. With assistance from ChatGPT, we generated our materials for these activities using a list of phrases from textbooks.
We demonstrated our plan in two classes in National Experimental High School, Hsinchu, Taiwan. The students loved it!
