Beyond Web VP: New ways of using Lextutor

Marti SevierSimon Fraser University

TESL CanadaOctober 14, 2012

Overview What is Lextutor?

Why? Learning outcomes/rationale

How can it be used? A sequence of tasks

How would you like to use it?

References

Questions/contact

What is Lextutor?

Using LextutorLearning outcomes/rationale

Text analysis: identify vocabulary items for teaching and learning

Practice based on… Multiple exposures Multiple, authentic contexts Opportunities for deep processing

Expansion of vocabulary knowledge:

Meaning in different contexts Word families Collocation Register Grammatical associations (colligation) Etc.

Background: A brief word about word lists

GSL: 1953, West, rev. 1995, Bauman & Culligan –2000 headwords

UWL: 1984, Xue & Nation AWL: 2000, Coxhead 570 headwords BNL: 2005, Neufeld & Billuroglu—

2709 words BNC-20: 2010, Cobb—20,000 words

Background: corporaWhat is a corpus?

A corpus is a collection of texts of written (or spoken) language

presented in electronic form. It provides the evidence of how

language is used in real situations, from which lexicographers can

write accurate and meaningful dictionary entries. By analysing the

corpus and using special software, we can see words in context and

find out how new words and senses are emerging, as well as

spotting other trends in usage, spelling, world English, and so on.

Source: About the Oxford English Corpus, http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/aboutcorpus

Corpora and word lists GSL: partially corpus-based but also compilation of

words voted upon by committee --2000 words UWL: compilation of 4 lists: Lynn (1973), Campion

and Elley (1971), (corpus-based), and Ghadessy (1979), and Praninskas (1972) (lists based on student annotations of words in texts).

AWL: corpus-based: academic texts in arts, commerce, law, and science (3.5 million running words)

BNL: based on commonly used word lists which are corpus-based, the Brown Corpus (1 m. words from range of written sources), and the British National Corpus (BNC) (100 million words from written and spoken sources)

BNC-20: based on British National Corpus

How can Lextutor be used? A sequence of tasks

1. KeyWords, WebVP: identify words for study

2. ID output: word recognition, spelling3. Cloze: meaning, context, collocation,

colligation4. Familizer: word families5. Concordancer: collocation, text

patterns6. GroupLex: all of the above...and more

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze

Text analysis tools: selecting words1. KeyWords Extractor

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze

Text analysis tools: selecting words1. KeyWords Extractor

22 key words (proper nouns eliminated)

freshwater maritime drought province navigate bureau lake river species pollute ship fish factory reach water previous city continue short include direct total

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--1

Text analysis tools: selecting wordsWeb Vocabulary Profiler (Web VP)

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--1

Text analysis tools: selecting wordsWeb Vocabulary Profiler (Web VP)AWL GSL K1: city continue direct factory fish

include lake reach river ship short total water

GSL: K2: 0AWL: previous OFF LIST: bureau drought freshwater

maritime navigate pollute province species

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--2

Text analysis tools: selecting words: the BNL

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--2

Text analysis tools: selecting wordsBNLbnl-1 city continue direct include previous reach

short total water bnl-2 factory river ship bnl-3 fish lake bnl-4 decline bnl-5 central meters statistics bnl-6 species OFF LIST freshwater maritime drought province

navigate bureau pollute

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--3

Text analysis tools: selecting words: the BNC-20

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--3

BNC-20 BNC 1000: city continue direct fish include

previous short total water BNC-2,000: factory reach river ship BNC-3,000: lake pollute species BNC-4,000: bureau province BNC-5,000: drought BNC-6,000: navigate BNC-8,000: maritime

A couple of caveats:

Infrequent ≠ difficult/necessary Teacher knowledge is key Curricular/syllabus demands

12 words…

drought maritime navigation reaches factories species bureau levels include continue director pollute

Application 1: I-D Word identification quiz

Rationale: Word recognition/spelling Increases speed of recognition Provides multiple contexts for words

Application 2: rational cloze passage

Why cloze? learners appear to like it, and [it can] train learners to read and rewrite

a text with a vocabulary focus (Lee, 2008)

Requires reader to use contextual clues to fill in gaps (Raymond, 1988)

…and a second cloze Video cloze

Caveat: keep length short, about 2-3 minutes How to:

Go to page source, search “embedurl” (no quotes) Copy the link without quotation marks and paste

into create page

Application 3: A word and more words: familizer

… rather than talking about “knowing a word”, we should be talking about “knowing a word family” (Nation 2001:47).

========================12 words: drought maritime navigation

reaches factories species bureau levels include continue director pollute

Familizer output

12 words: drought maritime navigation drastic reaches factories statistics species decline percent bureau levels marine chemical director

76 bureau bureaus continue continual continually continuance continued continuity continues continuing continuous continuously continuation continuations direct directed undirected directing directly director directors directorship directorships directs indirect indirectly directness directnesses drought droughts factory factories include included includes including incl inclusive inclusion level levelled leveller levelling leveled leveler leveling levels levelly maritime navigate navigated navigating navigates navigation navigations navigational navigator navigators circumnavigate circumnavigates circumnavigated circumnavigating circumnavigation pollute pollutes polluted polluting polluter polluters pollutant pollutants pollution pollutions antipollution reach reached reaches reaching species

Application 4: the concordancer

Collocation: “two or more words that occur frequently together” (Shin & Nation, 2007, 41)

Why?1. develop greater fluency2. Achieve “naturalness”, e.g.

“do my best” vs. “try my best”

Concordancer

Our word list again: drought maritime navigation drastic reaches factories statistics species decline percent bureau levels marine chemical director

Compare collocation in the passage to collocation in a concordancer

Concordancer: language analysis

What are two different meanings of “reaches” in the passage? Water in the upper reaches decreased by

over 60 percent from the previous year… ….. in the middle reaches of the river. Water depth at Yichang and Jingjiang in the

middle reaches of the river no longer reaches the navigation standard of 2.9 meters

Which use is more common?Compare to the concordance lines.

Concordancer: “reaches” Out of 53 concordance lines, only about

10% use “reaches” as it is used in the passage.

Questions for students to consider” Part of speech: noun or verb? If a noun: singular or plural? Context: in what type of texts might ths

word be used? To what topics is it related?

Note: use “all of the above under “Corpus”.

Concordancer: comparison Ask Ss to check collocations by typing into

concordancerX Students who cram for tests have increased risk for psychological

harm. OR Collect common collocation errors: mix with

correct collocations: use “extract” to pull up examples.

We then run the risk of being injured.Students who cram for tests have increased risk for psychological

harm.A message runs … a risk of being distorted if it is to be relayed

more than about six..times.

NOTE: Consider whether you are looking for a collocation to the left or to the right of the word. Here it is “left” because we want to look at the word/s that FOLLOW risk.

Putting it together: GroupLex

Student-driven learning – New or recycled vocabulary– Interactive: Ss set quizzes in pairs, trade– Personalized: focus on “their” area– Multiconc option: increased exposure,

contexts– Easy to monitor– Contact Tom Cobb to set up a site for your

students.

Now you try it / Questions?

After thoughts

Marti’s contact: msevier@sfu.ca Tom Cobb’s contact:

cobb.tom@uqam.ca (for Grouplex setup—takes about a week)

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