AESLA Round Table
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Transcript of AESLA Round Table
DDL AND KEY WORD PATTERNINGMIKE SCOTT, ASTON UNIVERSITY
4 MAY 2011
AESLA Round Table
Key Word Patterning
Emphases
Tim Johns and Data-Driven LearningMental processes in using the corpus
Learner perspective
“there is the pedagogic danger that one may, by making the program more powerful, be giving the machine tasks to do that should be left to the learner. For example, even if it were possible within the memory imitations of the microcomputer to do so, it would be of dubious benefit to offer the learner the standard option of mainframe concordancing packages for printing out a complete concordance for every word in the text or texts. Not only would learners easily be overwhelmed by the amount of printout generated, but the option would remove from them the crucial decision of deciding which word or words to investigate.”
Tim Johns, 1986:156.
Learner perspective
“there is the pedagogic danger that one may, by making the program more powerful, be giving the machine tasks to do that should be left to the learner. For example, even if it were possible within the memory imitations of the microcomputer to do so, it would be of dubious benefit to offer the learner the standard option of mainframe concordancing packages for printing out a complete concordance for every word in the text or texts. Not only would learners easily be overwhelmed by the amount of printout generated, but the option would remove from them the crucial decision of deciding which word or words to investigate.”
Tim Johns, 1986:156.
Points 1 & 2
Identify features of interestAvoid excessive complexity
KWIC
Viewed as ‘intake’ for language learning (Corder, 1967), a KWIC concordance occupies an intermediate position between the highly organized, graded, and idealized language of the typical coursebook, and the potentially confusing but far richer and more revealing ‘full flood’ of authentic communication. By concentrating and making it easy to compare the contexts within which a particular item occurs, it organizes data in a way that encourages and facilitates inference and generalization. (Tim Johns, 1986:159)
KWIC
Viewed as ‘intake’ for language learning (Corder, 1967), a KWIC concordance occupies an intermediate position between the highly organized, graded, and idealized language of the typical coursebook, and the potentially confusing but far richer and more revealing ‘full flood’ of authentic communication. By concentrating and making it easy to compare the contexts within which a particular item occurs, it organizes data in a way that encourages and facilitates inference and generalization. (Tim Johns, 1986:159)
Point 3
Encourage inference and generalisation
A concordance is […] very different from the conventional constructed exercise in which the learner is searching for a single ‘correct’ answer […] in practice, such exercises often fail to promote effective learning since for a particular learner or group of learners the task is too easy (in which case the most the exercise can achieve is to remind the learner of what he or she knows already), or too difficult (when […] the most that the learner can do is to learn the correct answer by heart once it has been revealed). The concordance is inherently more open and more flexible. Without questions given in advance, it leads the learner to generate his or her own questions, and to test them out against the evidence.
Johns (1986:159-160)
A concordance is […] very different from the conventional constructed exercise in which the learner is searching for a single ‘correct’ answer […] in practice, such exercises often fail to promote effective learning since for a particular learner or group of learners the task is too easy (in which case the most the exercise can achieve is to remind the learner of what he or she knows already), or too difficult (when […] the most that the learner can do is to learn the correct answer by heart once it has been revealed). The concordance is inherently more open and more flexible. Without questions given in advance, it leads the learner to generate his or her own questions, and to test them out against the evidence. (159-160)
Point 4
Generate your own suppositions
Tim Johns’ DDL Procedure
The basic procedure I teach for concordance-based learning research is "Identify - Classify - Generalise".Johns (1991: 4)
identify most common pattern (convince mostly followed by that); classify (convince is followed by relative clause)generalise (use convince … that but persuade … to)
See also
Tim Johns’ Kibbitzers
lexically.net/TimJohns/index.html
Example
Primary school children
Thinking in Colour
Year 4 and Year 5 children (age 8-10), Southampton
Noticing
Thinking
Points 5-7
ColourNoticingThinking
Strategies for noticing
Point 8
Scan vertically
Word Clouds
Point 9
Show overall view plus focussed detail
amet
Dispersion plots
here sorted by first appearance in the novel Bleak House
Point 10
Represent word-position by plot-mark
Then sort all the data as appropriate
text transformation
Conclusions
Users:Mental
Operations: identifying,
classifying, inference, generalisation, noticing, suppositions
Strategies Scan vertically Sort data
thinking
Conclusions
Teacher or Software Designer Strategies Avoid complexity, use colour Give overall view plus focussed
detail Transform data: text becomes word-
position plot-marks
Johns, T. MicroConcord: A Language learner’s research tool. System, Vol 14 No. 2, 151-162.
Johns, T. 1991. “Should you be Persuaded – Two samples of data-driven learning materials”, in Tim Johns & Philip King, 1991 (eds) “Classroom Concordancing”. ELR Journal Vol. 4. 1-16.
Thompson, Paul & Alison Sealey, 2004, An investigation into corpus-based learning about language in the primary school. ESRC Research Award R000223900. Available via http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ll/app_ling/internal/sst.htm