Abstract
The workbook is intended for students of Czech as a foreign language. It was originally complied as study material for the academic course Corpus-based Exercises (Grammar and Lexicon) that focused on a method using corpora in language learning.
The method called data-driven learning (DDL) was coined by Tim Johns in his seminal work at the beginning of the 1990s. He described DDL as an inductive approach to language learning consisting of three main pillars: identification - classification - generalisation (Johns, 1991).
This means that a student firstly identifies a problematical issue, then based on corpus data classifies a particular language phenomenon, and finally formulates rules based on generalisation. A similar approach is applied to the Czech language.
The present workbook aims to deliver ready-made ideas for exercises that practise certain problematic areas of non-native Czech to both teachers and students. It is divided into 14 chapters.
Each chapter represents a concrete linguistic obstacle concerning the following thematic areas: difference in meaning (word meaning based on context), grammatical gender, declension, nominalised adjectives, hard and soft adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, prefixes s- vs. z-, past participle, collocability, idioms, stylistic variants, competitive endings a- and u- of genitive singular, and vowel length. In total, the workbook consists of 135 exercises.
Each exercise is marked by an appropriate graphic symbol indicating whether the exercise requires direct work with a computer (hands-on) or is feasible in a paper form (hands-off). In its form, this publication is conceived as a classical workbook, from which teachers and students can select exercises based on their needs.
It is not necessary for the exercises offered here to be solved one by one. Although some of them are directly related to each other, which is signalled in the assignment.
An answer key was created for all exercises, which in many cases, in addition to the answers, also provides the procedure for resolving tasks. The exercises presented here may be used at various levels of language proficiency.
However, it is recommended to work with this material from B1 level and higher where learners are to some extent linguistically independent and will not have much difficulty with understanding assignment and working with corpus tools.