Final bringing native speaker corpora into the classroom final
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This document discusses using corpora and concordancing in the classroom. It proposes a three step approach: 1) Having students notice language patterns and problem areas, 2) Using concordance lines to analyze language patterns and experiment with usage, 3) Applying these techniques to editing student writing. Several online corpora and concordancing tools are presented that teachers and students can use, such as the Longman Dictionary, WebCorp, and the American Corpus. Frequency counts and concordances are presented as useful for understanding usage and meaning.
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Final bringing native speaker corpora into the classroom final
- 1. Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it
- 2. SIGNPOSTING THE TALK The Internet as a corpus: cheap popular but BE CAREFUL Frequency counts for usage and concordance searches for meaning Using specialised corpora for study and in class Using the Longman Dictionary Using other web based sites in class Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it
- 3. CORPORA IN CLASS Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it oSearch engines for the Internet :started to rain = 468,000 started raining =361,000 owww.googlefight.com o“Give importance”/ “siehmich or ziehmlich?” Which is more common? “It started to rain.” or “It started raining.” oFactors Influencing Choice oRegional variety oIdiolect oPersonal choice oMeaning oRegister
- 4. CONCORDANCING Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it Kwic Search of the WEB: • and related fields; the possibility of benefiting from thirty years • at your own facilities; the possibility of using our networks and • or institutions in Europe; the possibility of using our offices as • to our capacity restraints); the possibility of using our web-site for management • events at your institution; the possibility for your doctoral students to (Extract from a KWIC search using the Webcorp interface site to look for instances of the word “possibility”)
- 5. LOOKING FOR MEANING Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it o Concordance Lines o www.webcorp.org.uk Why can’t I say “We’re going to have a beautiful day!”
- 6. HOW CAN WE WORK WITH CORPORA? Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it
- 7. University of Verona CLA, sharon.hartle@univr.it Noticing patterns: what does it mean? Possibility •Brief analysis of “Possibility” from LDOCE examples: •18 examples of which 5 are in the plural so should be treated separately. possibility possibility possibility possibility possibility possibility possibility possibility possibilities possibilities possibilities possibilities a real The a distinct a faint a the the no many exciting all offer several Very often used with quantities both in singular and plurals: Ind. Article + adjective Def article very common in the singular Quantities common in the plural seems to be There’s There is still there is We are considering We could not ignore There was absolutely have opened up We need to investigate Voice input and output there are Verbal choice in the sing. “there is/are + a” “Mental /verbal types + the” Material verbs in the plural
- 8. CORPORA IN THE CLASSROOM THREE STEPS: Noticing language: possibility worksheet Working on error : give importance Working on writing: markin’ Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it
- 9. APPLYING THESE TECHNIQUES TO WRITING Editing stage of writing Peer evaluation and editing Self evaluation after texts were marked by teacher Learner enthusiasm Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it “The Longman Dictionary has opened up exciting possibilities for us.”
- 10. HOW ARE CORPORA AND CONCORDANCING SITES USEFUL? What tools can I use in class? http://www.webcorp.org.uk http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English WordSmith Tools programme Two more sites: Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it
- 11. USING MORE REFINED SEARCHES http://www.americancorpus.org “beautiful day” http://www.lextutor.ca 2 Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it
- 12. CONCLUSION Thanks to the work of applied linguists we now have corpora which can be a wonderful resource both for private study and for use in the classroom; Frequency is one aspect which interests those learners who ask “Which is more common?” But to go more deeply into the way language works concordance line studies can prove to be of infinitely greater value. Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it
- 13. Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it
- 14. HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW? What are corpora? Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it What is concordancing? Corpora and concordancing are very useful for private study of the language but what about the classroom?
- 15. ONE THREE STEP APPROACH TO CLASSROOM WORK Noticing specific problem areas (collocation, language patterns and semantic prosody). Learning how to use concordance lines to notice language patterns and experimenting with them. Applying these techniques to learner writing at the editing stage. Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it
- 16. NOTICING SPECIFIC PROBLEM AREAS Noticing worksheet. Familiarising learners with the notions of collocation, language patterns and semantic prosody; The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: sharon.hartle@univr.it What’s going on?
- 17. STAGE 2. LEARNING HOW TO USE CONCORDANCE LINES Noticing language patterns and experimenting with them LDOCE Possibility Worksheet Sharon Hartle: University of Verona, language centre: s http://www. googlefight. http://www.webcorp.org.uk comhttp://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Editor's Notes
- The worlds of research into theoretical or applied linguistics may often seem to be long way from the classroom, and the concerns of language teachers on the other hand, just as far from the study of language. The two things, however, are connected and it is important to find a bridge so that the discoveries in one field can be enjoyed and used by the other. This should be a two way process and the image on the slide is one of growth, bringing the hope that we can both grow with the help of each other. Corpora were initially developed for study of the language and are now widely used by linguistics, lexicographers and course book materials writers. Recent developments in language teaching towards a greater awareness of the way grammar and lexis are interlinked are one of the fruits of this research. Sinclair’s ground-breaking work with Corpus Linguistics, for instance, opened the doors to others who have studied the way lexis works, and it is largely as a result of this work that today’s course-books frovide work on such areas as collocation or “hot delexicalized verbs” etc. This is just one way in which materials have benefited from research. There are, of course, many others. Using native speaker corpora, and learner coprora, as Sian will show us later, can enrichen the way we teach and work with language, but just how much do teachers actually know about corpora and concordancing? How can we use these techniques and the corpora that have been developed, in the classroom?
- Corpora are used for many things but two of the main areas of language study they are useful for are frequency counts and concordancing. Both of these are things that can be used in class but how? What tools can we use? Perhaps the biggest corpus of language available to us is the Internet and we can search the Internet to find out how people are actually using English on a daily basis. Of course a lot of the language being used may be “dubious” for the purposes of language study but the fact remains that a body of language used globally for people to communicate 80% of which is in English, is a very valuable resource for us. This is particularly true when it comes to looking at frequency. One very common questions, particularly, but by no means only, in Intermediate B1 level classes, is “Which is more common?” The Internet itself can be used for a quick look at how common language use is: (watch videos 1 and 2) This is, however, as I said, a rather simplistic way at looking at language and whilst it may be fun there are all kinds of factors that might skew the results such as the fact that a phrase is part of song lyrics, or the fact that a search has not been refined enough. One learner recently asked me if we could do a google fight to see which was more common between “lift” and “elevator” and if the search is restricted just to those words then all kinds of synonyms will get in the way, as it were. Lift can also be a verb and has synonyms such as a lift in a car. So we refined the search to a phrase: “ride in a lift” or “ride in an elevator”. We found, to our astonishment that the simple google and yahoo search engines gave us different results to googlefight. So, what I mean is that googlefight is a fun, quick activity to raise awareness and fix the idea of difference and frequency in learners’ minds but then we need to go further and examine other factors such as: Difference in meaning Register, Local variation This type of search does not really help though when learners have problem with how to use language structurally or semantically. One First Certificate learner for example asked “Why can’t I say “I’ve had a beautiful day.” The more I see this the more correct it looks but this was one case where the teacher actually said: “I know it’s wrong but I can’t actually tell you why. It’s just English!” This is where we need to use concordancing programmes to look at how words behave in company of other words. The words being combined here are “have” “beautiful” “day”. We can still look at the Internet to do this although in this particular case it wasn’t very helpful as we’ll see in a moment. For a more in depth study of language using the Internet a good site is Webcorp which actually acts as a concordancing programme searching the Internet to produce concordance lines. This allows us to study the language on the net in more detail but the Net itself may well have an abundance of such items as song lyrics etc. depending on what everyone is talking about at any given point in time. (Watch video 3) The Internet then can be fun and a valuable resource but it needs to be treated with velvet gloves. Other corpora exist which have collected language perhaps more objectively and organised it precisely with the idea of studying language in mind. Let us now go on to look at how we can use these specialised corpora.
- Concordancing programmes are only one type of programmes used to search corpora, but they are extremely useful for the study of phenomena such as collocation, patterning and semantic prosody because they perform what are known as key word in context or (Kwic) searches that put the word or phrase you are searching for in the centre of a line of text. This means it is very easy for the eye to look up and down the examples and see what often co occurs with the central item, like this example of “possibility” an item which for Italian learners causes untold problems because of meaning, and collocation.
- We all know that Corpus originates from the Latin for “body” and “corpora” refer to bodies of text, both written and spoken, compiled and annotated in various ways. What struck researchers orginially was the sheer quantity of “naturally” ocurriing language that could be stored and easily processed or searched by computers, who could find examples of words in seconds, when we poor humans would probably take weeks, months if not years to do the same job. Big corpora have been compiled such as the British National Corpus, in the UK, which includes 100 million words of written and spoken language. The reason I mention it is that it is easily accessible online and can be used in class or autonomously by learners to find information about how words or language patterns work in practice. Big corpora have the advantage of providing many examples but there is a growing interest in small corpora too. Nowadays this is because a specialised corpus of one particular type of language may be studied to show how language is used in specific, specialised contexts. Certain terms are used in business English, for example, in ways in which they might not be used in other contexts or with different frequency rates. One example of this, discussed by Anne O’Keefe, Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter, in their book From Corpus to Classroom, is the term “going forward” which when used in business contexts means roughly “in the future”. This was discovered by analyzing the CANBEC corpus (Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus) a smaller corpus, relatively speaking, which contains 1 million words of spoken Business English. It is actually part of the much larger Cambridge International Corpus (1 billion words of British, American and Learner English). Being able to search “bodies” of language like this means that we can see certain things very clearly such as: Collocation (the words that co-occur in texts with others) Whilst we have always been aware of the phenomenon searching corpora helps us to see very clearly the different types of collocation that there are. Patterning, both grammatical and lexical, such as whether we put an article in an expression like “to have a coffee break” or not, as in “to have lunch”, which cannot always be put down simply to the rules governing countable and uncountable nouns. The third area I intend to look at quickly is semanitc prosody or the colouring of language, whether something is used positively or negative, what ideas are associated with it. This is a fuzzy area in fact, that cannot be pinned down to one or two co occuring items and often means looking at numerous examples to see what the overall effect of the language use is. One good example of this, which we often notice from learner errors in the classroom is “unique”. A learner said “English is my unique problem, because she was aware of “unique” as referring to something single, but the prosody in English is of something positive and precious. This is not necessarily the same in other language and is therefore a very interesting area to study.
- A very brief look at the patterning from the corpus mode of the LDOCE examples shows us a series of useful patterns that learners’ attention could profitable be drawn to: Further analysis, which there is no time to look at in detail here reveals that the left-hand patterning often corresponds to right-hand patterning: Singular: Where “there is” etc. is used on the left-hand side of the noun the right hand pattern is often “that”+ projected clause; Where the noun is the direct object of a verbal/mental process the right-hand pattern tends to be a prepositional phrase which post-modifies the noun in some way, often with “of”. Plural: (Only very few examples, however) There is no such clear distinction between patterns for noun post modification, as various patterns are used: For + noun (1 case) For + gerund (1 case) Relative clause with “which” As to + who clause
- Of course, the work done in stage 2 was basically a guided discovery prepared by the teacher, and as such was helpful to learners as a preparatory stage, but what was needed now was for them to be able to recognize their own “problem areas” and carry out their own concordance line analyses in a similar way. A considerable amount of assistance can be provided by the teacher in class, but the overall aim was for the learners to be able to work independently in the long run, with their dictionaries. This type of analysis is very useful at the editing stage of writing, so learners were asked to write a piece of work which they then brought to class. In groups they looked at each other’s writing and were asked to identify meaning, collocation, language patterning and semantic prosody problems. I had had some reservations about this beforehand, thinking that they would not be able to identify these areas, but, in fact, they were extremely capable of identifying problem areas, and rather than just saying “it sounds wrong” they were now able, more often than not, to identify their own problems. Perhaps the most complex area for them was semantic prosody as it is deeply ingrained from the first language. They were then asked to choose five items to study in more detail, and to use their dictionaries to do an analysis of the patterns they could find. This was very interesting as they found, for example: “I was unsure writing” would be better expressed as “I was unsure what to write” or “I was unsure what I could/should write.” This is just one example of the type of pattern they found, and then experimented with. Look in the dictionary to check the meaning of “hear” and “listen”. Look to see how they are used. Which is better here and why? This work was then further extended by learners sending their written work by email to the teacher who then sent it back annotated with comments, questions and a correction code to help them correct their own work. Each learner was then allotted a twenty minute interview with the teacher where they could bring their corrected work and discuss the changes they had made and why. The questions asked, at this stage, were also designed to direct learners towards the dictionary and examples of language in context:
- One teacher in a job interview when asked how he dealt with collocation in class replied “I don’t know what to do with it!” A lot of people may well shake their heads at this, when coursebooks about with examples of collocations, but in fact, I have a lot of sympathy with this. Michael Lewis had us all feeling very excited when he first outlined his “Lexical Approach” but what we have since discovered is that this approach is rather hard to put into practice systematically, so that teachers often return to the framework of a grammar/skills based syllabus, because it is easier to structure a framework. Grammar has rules, and there is a progression from simple things to more complex things. Lexis transforms from one context to the next in an ongoing dance with intricately mapped out steps. It is, indeed, difficult to structure a lexical syllabus, but on the other hand there must be, as ………………… recently wrote in his article The Lexical Dimension, “a lexical dimension to teaching” to as learners need to be aware of the collocations patterning and sematic prosody of discourse. Creating a lexis based syllabus, however, is probably not the answer. Learners need differing lexis much more than grammar, and in different contexts different lexis will be required. This is where, at least in my teaching, the corpora have proved to be an invaluable resource. Teachers can use them for research Learners can use them for research They can also be used in class I now want to look at one particular approach to doing this.
- I’m sure a lot of people here are expert but as this talk is general I just want to spend a few minutes looking at two basic concepts: What are corpora? What is concordancing?
- Concordance lines themselves can be used for guided discovery in class, and learners can be encouraged to do their own searches, or, at the very least, to look at concordance lines provided in good dictionaries Such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE). This does not always come naturally to those looking at words as single items or short chunks but once learners are aware of the patterns they can see in concordance lines they see a whole new world opening up in front of them. To illustrate What I means by this I would like to describe one way of using the concordance lines from the LDOCE in class to help learners development the skills tney needs to interpretazione the information, inother words,by helping themselves to know What to look for. This, it must be remembered, is simply one example of an approach used, as I said earlier and in this specific case it was used to enable my C1 level university students to become more successful at writing. The approach can be summarised in three steps:
- The three areas focused on were collocation, language patterning and semantic prosody as These are problematic for my advanced level learners. They were firstly asked if they remembered What the three terms referred to, as some had met them before, being language students, whereas others had not. It soon became clear from the discussion that a review would be of benefit to almost everyone, so this was done by providing examples of the problems from learners' language (although the level chosen was lower r than theirs so that they would have no trouble identifying the error, at least, in the first two cases.) These three examples were given to the class and the learners were asked to identify the problem and What type of error it was. This was done with the following worksheet.
- In the first part of this worksheet learners are asked to notice relevant information about the terms “possibility” and “possibilities”, in this way learning both how to look at concordance lines and also how to look at language. The very fact that a noun may differ in its usage in the plural form than in the singular may come as quite a shock to many learners (and even teachers for that matter). The second part of the worksheet is dedicated to experimenting. Learners are asked to reformulate these patterns and to “make them their own”. This personalization is an essential step, in my view, as it is by using the language successfully to say something that is relevant to them that it becomes really meaningful and memorable for learners. By doing what may seem to be quite a laborious exercise the learners actually elaborate a whole series of notions, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. In one lesson, one learner, who arrived late to class, and who, consequently, had not elaborated the information the others had, was not able to do the second part of the worksheet. This may seem to be obvious, but it underlined for me just how useful this type of study and internalisation is.