for materials design the theory & practice of concordancing

for Materials Design

The Theory & Practice of Concordancing

Richard S. LavinRichard S. Lavin

Prefectural University of KumamotoPrefectural University of Kumamoto

rlavin@pu-kumamoto.ac.jprlavin@pu-kumamoto.ac.jp

Create materials for a new graduate school reading course.

Students from more than 10 different disciplines under broad umbrella of Environmental Science.

Goals & situation

Easy

Quick

Low cost

Customizable

Preferably learnable by students

Criteria

All students need to be able to read science texts

For this they need:

general English vocabulary (GSL or LDV)

academic vocabulary (AWL)

specialist vocabulary

More on purpose and teaching context

Students of widely differing abilities & learning histories

Preparation for a 2nd semester writing course

Allow students to create own syllabus

More on purpose & context

Graded readers

LDV and basic sentence patterns

Analysis of specialist texts

Concordancing, etc.

Summarizing/translation of scientific texts

better done after analysis of same texts

Three-part syllabus

Johns, T. F. (1994) From printout to handout: grammar and vocabulary teaching in the context of data-driven learning. In Odlin, T. (ed.), Perspectives on pedagogical grammar. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Data-driven learning

Hadley, G. (1997) Sensing the winds of change: an introduction to data-driven learning. Available from http://web.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/winds.htm

Data-driven learning

Focusing on words and then on how they are used in sources chosen by students may increase motivation.

Students can learn a little grammar by stealth.

Approaches to grammar teaching

Find suitable texts

Create corpus

Analyze corpus

Create learning/teaching materials

Concordancing: outline of method

Encourage students to find a journal that is as close as possible to their narrow field of specialization.

What are suitable texts?

It is desirable that students “absorb” lexical, syntactic, stylistic features “incidentally”.

Using a single journal limits variability to some extent, making this more likely.

Students probably know many specialist terms already.

Creates an understandable context for new words.

What are suitable texts?

taken care of in each student’s lab?

already known or learnt through ER

difficult to learn without formal study

relatively manageable number of words

effect is large relative to number of words

www.sciencedirect.com

from Elsevier Science

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com

from Blackwell Publishers

www.doaj.org

Directory of Open Access Journals

1. Finding suitable texts

Most offer free abstracts.

Most allow purchase of full-text articles by credit card.

Sometimes, a few sample full-text articles are offered at no charge.

What’s available?

Large quantity of text required

Abstracts are short

Copying and pasting hundreds of abstracts can be very time-consuming

Use text capture tool like StickyBrain or DEVONthink

Capturing text

Lots of abstracts may be better than a few full-text articles: representative of a genre

Probably best to get all abstracts from one journal: enables mastery of that journal style

good preparation for 2nd semester writing course

Important to motivate students

Capturing text

Use concordancer

Create list of words in texts

Give frequencies of words

Show contexts

Analyze corpus

Use more generic science texts to generate handouts for the most important words in AWL. Do these together before asking students to make their own materials in their field of specialization... OR

Make abstracts or papers in each student’s field the main focus of the course.

Options

AWL Highlighter

AWL Gapmaker

Other tools

abstract from Atmopheric Environment, 34(17), from ScienceDirect

http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/textools/web_vp.html

This program color-codes the words in a text in 4 categories: top 1000, 2nd 1000, AWL, other

Web Vocab Profiler

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Teaching students to use a concordancer and related tools can enable them to use

materials that match their interests, even if the content difficulty is far beyond their

present level. These tools do this by allowing students to focus on specific

features of texts. Hopefully, students will be able to make generalizations about

particular genres and sub-genres, deepening their understanding by degrees.