Vocabulary and the cambridge english corpus
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•2,001 views
This document discusses strategies for learning new vocabulary. It notes that the number of words in a language is hard to estimate but there are over 141,000 different singular words in English. Frequency is important for vocabulary learning, as the top 100 most common words account for around 50% of written text. Knowing a word involves understanding its definition, spelling, grammar, common phrases, collocations, register, and related words. Corpora like the Cambridge English Corpus can provide frequency and context data to help learn vocabulary effectively.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Featured
Featured (20)
Vocabulary and the cambridge english corpus
- 3. Strategies for learning new vocabulary..
- 4. garrulous (adjective) Hard to estimate words in a language, more than one sense. dog. 141,476 different singular words
- 5. 141,476 evolving – garrulous 93,596. uni edu native – 25,000
- 6. garrulous (adjective) 93,596 extensive studies into corpus – linguistics – corpora available – cambridge english corpus
- 7. Frequency? Most common English word
- 8. Top 100 words Top 100 - 200 Neither words would govern write expensive drink ear case down however is and see public people afraid
- 9. Figures taken from the Cambridge English Corpus, 2011 Top 100 words Top 100 - 200 Neither words and (3) see (106) case (727) is (7) write (120) afraid (927) would (63) public (166) drink (1472) people (80) govern (173) expensive (1570) down (93) however (181) ear (3845) Relationship between words – collocations , chunks
- 13. Afraid He feels afraid He is afraid of spiders Spiders make him feel afraid Spiders are terrifying The spider terrified him He is scared to death of spiders So let’s make our very own small corpus for one of the words earlier - write
- 14. Write…. 1, 2, 3, 4, cambridge english corpus - case
- 15. So…what does it mean to ‘know’ a word?
- 16. Knowing a word includes… • understanding its core meaning (dictionary definition) • spelling and pronunciation • grammar and construction • being aware of common phrases associated with it • recognising collocations • Noticing formulaic language / chunks • register – formal, informal or specialist • getting to know its word family • grasping prefixes and suffixes
Editor's Notes
- Good morning everyone, firstly many thanks for sparing the time this morning to spend a few hours with us here. I hope it will be beneficial to you.For my session now, I would like us to look at vocabulary – as learners of English/a language I would imagine in this room today that we have all tried many different approaches, methods and techniques when trying to learn and indeed memorise new words. For instance, some people believe that reading a dictionary from front cover to back cover and literally memorising the words page by page alphabetically will guarantee success. Do you think this works?When I first started teaching in Japan more than 10 years ago I met this really interesting student named Satoshi who in some ways was a genius – now, he had spent so long memorising his trusted dictionary that if I said for instance what does ‘collaborate’ mean? He would say kind of robotically – ‘Collaborate verb, collaboration noun, collaborative adjective and this means to work together on an activity’ This word is on page 127. Amazing ay? However if I pushed him further and asked him to create a sentence using collaborate, he could only say the example he mentioned from the dictionary itself: ‘I collaborate on an activity’. So although he had spent hours and hours, days and days memorising his dictionary, his overall language ability was still extremely limited. So I’m sure you will all have better ideas of how to learn/record new vocabulary items so as a very quick sharing activity I would like you with your friend to write down 2 or 3 effective ways of learning/recording new English vocabulary…
- Firstly can anybody try to pronounce this word? And does anybody know what it means? Satoshi the Japanese student does! Ok, so garrulous means extremely talkative – it sounds quite strange but as a teacherof English I am actually quite pleased that nobody in here today knows this word. So why would I have this opinion? Well, it is hard to estimate the exact number of words in any given language largely because many words have more than one meaning – more than one sense. In Japanese ‘hashi’ can mean chopsticks, bridge and sensitive. For instance ‘dog’ as a noun is an animal but ‘dog’ as a verb means to follow someone persistently in the same way a spy would. If we calculate all these different senses of words they will probably exceed a million. Different words themselves however are different and in English there are 141,476 different singular words in use
- However this figure is evolving all the time – languages evolve. If my great greatgreatgreat grandparents could listen in on our talk today the chances are they wouldn’t fully understand what we are discussing.So garralous which we just talked about is listed as the 93,596 most common / most frequent word spoken in English. So as a result it rarely exists – to give you an example a university educated native speaker of English has an active vocabulary of approximately 25,000
- So garralous which we just talked about is listed as the 93,596 most common / most frequent word spoken in English. So as a result it rarely exists – to give you an example a university educated native speaker of English has an active vocabulary of approximately 25,000.Now how do I know that garrulous (meaning extremely talkative) is the 93,596 most commonly used spoken word in English? We know this through extensive studies into language Corpus in the field of linguistics. There are many corpora out there available to access on the internet for instance but what I believe is the most advanced is the Cambridge English Corpus. Using a corpus in this way shows how frequent a word occurs in both spoken and written English.
- After going through this, show that we are going to play a game…Who can tell me the most common used word in English? ‘the’.
- Any surprises here?‘the’ is the most common word in English‘of’ is secondAs well as informing us about the most common used words in English a corpus like the Cambridge English Corpus can also inform us about the relationship betweensingle separate words…these are often known as collocations..For instance if I say ‘interested’ then often this collocates with ‘in’ so ‘interested in’.
- In English, as well as collocations, we also have ‘formulaic language’ known as ‘chunks’ of language…We are going to look at these in more detail but before we do… - Okay, please allow me to introduce you to 2 people….
- In English, as well as collocations, we also have ‘formulaic language’ known as ‘chunks’ of language…We are going to look at these in more detail but before we do… - Okay, please allow me to introduce you to 2 people….
- I also created a conversation myself and here it is…
- Here I have highlighted what are different types of chunks / formulaic language…get particpants to underline them if they wrote it down before or just get them to write down the red highlighted words..
- So a lot of these are different types of formulaic language and here they are, get p’s to quickly match them (2mins), then reveal them… Improves fluency – speaking and writing, faster comprehension – reading and listening, better comprehension – listening to fast speech
- Improves fluency – speaking and writing, faster comprehension – reading and listening, better comprehension – listening to fast speechThen handout reading task – English Unlimited then p’s search for all the formulaic langauge.
- Just for a bit of fun, how would you elicit these parts of speech / formulaic langauge / chunks with your own students – maybe invite some ideas..? (depending on time).