Using corpora to enhance language

learningMichael Barlow

Overviewwordlists

collocation lists

online concordancers

text analysis software

concordancers

ParaConc and Collocate

web-based exercises

data-driven learning materials

Wordlists – general and specialised

Wordlists have been around since before the invention of computers. General wordlists are used for curriculum development, textbook writing etc.

Also possible to produce a word list for a reading (or a possibly textbook)

Wordlists – general

Use existing wordlists such as West's General Service List and recent updates. Coxhead's Academic Wordlist. Kilgarriff's Wordlists based on the BNC.

Kilgarriff Page

Academic Word List

Academic Word List

Academic Word List

• receptive list (based on morphological derivations)

• the list excludes words found in non-academic texts (even if they occur in academic texts)

• do we need subject or genre-specific wordlists? (Hyland)

Specialised Word List

• Create a wordlist from a corpus (using concordancer or other utilities)

• May need to create your own corpus – BootCaT ?? Silvia Bernadini

BootCaT

Vocab Profile

• Tom Cobb's Vocab Profile

• http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/

Collocation lists

• More difficult to find – use Collocation Dictionary??

• Biber's work on lexical bundles

• Use concordancer or utility to create ngram lists or locate collocations

• Collocate – shown below

Concordancers

• Online concordancer

Concordancers

Concordancers – americancorpus.org

Concordancers• Using a concordancer in the classroom

• Corpus as a reference tool – query the corpus

– can you say “the government are”

– what is the difference between “for instance” and “for example”

– Tim Johns – Data-driven Learning

• (...caused economic development...)

Concordancers – text reconstruction

exercises

Data-driven learning (deductive)

Data-driven learning(inductive)

Concordance data

• DDL – highlighting/noticing/discovery learning

• Highlight unexpected (for the learner) distinctions, uses etc.

• Sequence data to build up knowledge

Parallel concordance data

• Parallel concordance works on translation corpus

• Students need to have same L1

Concordance data issues

• KWIC format

• Google effect

• Data overload

• Reauthenticating data

– Sabine Braun – includes discourse perspective (Why did the speaker use that form?)

Parallel Corpora – DDL (CHUJO, Kiyomi)

Parallel Corpora – DDL (Chujo, Kiyomi)

Collocate

Software to extract collocations/terms

Word search + Span (2 words, 3 words etc.)

n-gram (bigram, trigram) list

Full extract -- collocations in a corpus

Search for analysis (Span = 2)

analysis - frequency

analysis - t-score

analysis - MI

Trigram search

Trigram -- by freq

Trigram -- alphabetical

Trigram -- by MI

Using batch mode –

Corpuslab.com Familiar exercise authoring

Currently offline

Aims

avoid duplication of tasks -- identifying common collocations in Business English

Provide corpus/analysis resources

Bring corpus resources together with familiar exercise authoring

Student View

Student View

Student View

Student View

Exercise types

Matching

Fill-the-gap

Multiple Choice

Reorder

Categorise

Exercise types

Matching*

Fill-the-gap

Multiple Choice

Reorder

Categorise*

Teacher view

Teacher view

Teacher view

Teacher view - Resources

Resources

Teacher-generated resources

uploaded frequency lists

worksheets

Tracking

Teachers can track their exercises

“Class teachers” track students in their class

Tracking

Report for exercise Cat1

Tracking of student

School view

Register as a school

Create class names

Assign teachers to classes

Track students in classes

School view

School view

Resources

Site resources

corpora and simple concordancer

text analysis utilities

Text analysis utilities

Create frequency lists

Text analysis in terms of frequency bands

Collocational analysis of texts

Corpora

Teacher/Author resource

Sample corpus -- CSPAE

Add other corpora such as MICASE

Create various options for searching that make use of corpus annotation

Simple searching

Aims

Create a language learning site

Encourage and facilitate use of corpus data

Matching exercise (up to 5 columns)

Provide access to word lists etc

Provide text analysis tools

Aims

Use traditional exercise types that teachers are familiar with

Give examples of creative uses of these standard exercises

Thank you