MAKING ENGLISH REAL: THE USE OF CORPUS DATA AND TECHNIQUES IN THE ECUADORIAN CLASSROOMAnna M. Gates

Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja

Welcome to the world of corpora

Activity 1 (20 minutes)

Instructions Part 1 (10 minutes)

Read the first page of your packet

Superfoods: Protect Your Body by Eating Right

Highlight the target word

Group 1: FoodGroup 2: LikeGroup 3: May

Group 4: VeggiesGroup 5: FamilyGroup 6: Which

Part 2 Instructions

Write concordance lines on board (5 minutes)

What can we notice about the target word or the other words around it?

Let’s explore the world of corpora

What are corpora? Collections or databases

of language

What are Concordance lines?

Today we are going to focus on English Language Corpora and how to take advantage of the wealth of information in our own classrooms

Reading concordance lines

Concordance lines indiscriminately include some number of words before the main word and some number of words after.

This means there are often incomplete sentences

However, the general idea can be understood

Students need to note where the action takes place or what the situation is

Let’s look at….Hire

experts recommend that new co-ops hire paid staff. Professionally run stores

I'm going to hire people to market across the country.

to frighten companies who hire undocumented workers.

In some cases, caregivers hire home health aides or support staff

information about fire closures. Hire Big Sur Hiking Guides,

has a new dilemma: Who will he hire to maximize Rose?

coach K, who turned out to be a sharp hire after hoops insiders

Revolution of corpus linguistics in the past 25 years

Yesterday’s corpora

Survey of English Usage (early 1960’s)

Brown Corpus (1964)

Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen (1978)

Today’s corpora

COBUILD

British National Corpus

One million words Over 250 million words

What can corpora tell us about English?

Frequency of words

What is the most frequent word in the English language?

The

Why would we care to know what the most frequent words in English are?

The meanings of bet

As we know, the same word often has more than one meaning. Corpora can help use know what meaning of a word is most frequently used For example: bet (13,648 hits)

To gamble: as in “he bet $1 on the game” (fewer than 100)

A supposition: “I bet that you and your family are happy” (172)

An option: as in “our best bet is to use our voice” (724 hits)

How textbooks treat vocabulary

Diana was surprised when the dinner guests appeared an hour early.

The meaning is to be or become physically present

Terribly urgent, a phrase presented in a basic level

Textbooks often misrepresent the most important uses of words, or the most important words to use

How textbooks treat vocabulary

Concordance lines for appeared

Less than 62% of the examples use the same meaning as the text.

The other significant meaning is to indicate a probability.

Terribly urgent only appears 5 times in a 37 million word corpus.

Corpora help us see how native English speakers most often use the words

Contexts of words

In addition to finding out the most common meanings of words, corpora can help us know under what situations the words are most commonly used.

For example

“Break out”

Let’s look at this in a corpus

Making the learning of words meaningful

The activity we have just completed demanded observation and critical thinking, two essential skills that good teachers will develop in their students

Students will be unlikely to forget the meanings and context of the word when it is actively learned.

Gender in English?

As we know, the English language doesn’t have a gender consideration in its syntax, however there are some words that are more commonly used when talking about women (or men) that wouldn’t be used with the other sex.

Can you think of any?

A corpus can help us.

Gender in English?

Let’s consider the word “taciturn”. This means habitually silent, reserved, or uncommunicative . Do you think that it is most often used when describing men or women?

Let’s look at the corpus

8 of 31 unsure of the sex of the people referred to meaning 75% of the use of the word is with men and 25% of the time doesn’t provide enough information to know for sure.

Are we teaching real English grammar?

Corpus evidence shows that much of the grammar typically taught from textbooks is not as relevant in “real life” communication as they lead us to believe.

For example, reported speech. Typical textbook example:

“I’m coming to see you tomorrow” Reported speech: “He said he was coming to see me tomorrow”

In actual usage: “He said he`s coming to see me tomorrow” “He said he’d come tomorrow”

Textbook grammar shouldn’t be discarded, but it should be complemented by real usage examples based on corpus evidence

The fine art of collocation

Collocation is the typical groupings of words, or words that tend to go together

Learning these will make the EFL students’ production more natural. When there are similar expressions in

Spanish and English, L1 interference is common.

Examples from advanced Ecuadorian speakers of English “Discuss about”

“Catch attention”

Use of “do” and “make”

What to look for: Working with students and concordance lines

Part of speech of the word(s) that precedes or follows a particular word.

Let’s look at the word Grow

What can you tell me about this word?

No computers in class? No problem

Using concordance activities is recommended at all levels.

Before attempting to use concordance lines in class, it is important that: The students have a good learner dictionary

You teach them how to read concordance lines

You teach them how to write their own concordance lines

First activity

Identify some aspect of the language students are studying in their textbook (vocabulary or grammar).

Locate an authentic reading source that contains several instances of the word or grammatical structure, ideally this should have been previously read for communicative purposes

Ask students to reread the material, but have them highlight the focus word or structure

In groups ask them to write concordance lines for all of the occasions in which the word was found

Ask them to identify all the examples that have the same meaning and use as they have studied in their textbook

Ask them to guess the meaning, part of speech of example that don’t seem to have the same meaning

Useful websites

Ananova http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_105441.ht

ml

Corpus of American English http://www.americancorpus.org/

The Free Dictionary http://www.thefreedictionary.com

Tower of English http://towerofenglish.com/literacynetcnnsfarchives.h

tml

References

Fox, G. (2008). Using corpus data in the classroom. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Materials development in language teaching (pp. 25-43). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Haugnes, N. & Maher B. (2004). NorthStar reading and writing. New York: Pearson Education

Willis, J. (2008). Concordances in the classroom without a computer: Assembling and exploiting concordances of common words. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Materials development in language teaching (pp. 44-66). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

agates@utpl.edu.ec