concordancing and esl
DESCRIPTION
This workshop was given to staff at a Gulf College to introduce the EFL staff to the world of concordancing.TRANSCRIPT
- 1. Concordancing And EFL John Allan EFL Instructor 08/16/09
- 2. Topics to Be Covered
- What is concordancing
- Concordancers
- Web based resources
- Materials creation
- Linguistics
- Summary
- 3. Concordance
- is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts
- KWIC (key word in context)
- 4. Concordancer
- a computer program that automatically constructs a concordance
- 5. Corpus
- body of texts available for examination
- Single
-
- For item analysis
- Parallel
-
- For linguistic language comparison
- 6. Corpus Characteristics
- Should have a descriptive header
- Raw or unannotated
- Annotated
- Tags, similar to
- Tags indicate; parts of speech
- 7. Web based Corpus
- American National Corpus
- http://americannationalcorpus.org
- British National Corpus
- http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
- International Corpus of English http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice/avail.htm
- COBuild Corpus http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx
- 8. Collocations
- a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance
- collocations are characteristic, co-occurence patterns of words. For example: "Christmas" may collocate with "tree", "angel &"presents"
- 9. Concordancers
- WordSmith Tools
- Microconcord
- Monoconc
- Collins CoBuild
- 10. Web based concordancers
- Web based concordancer
- http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/
- 11. Linguistics
- study of a text
- comparing different usages of the same word
- analysing keywords
- analysing word frequencies
- finding and analysing phrases and idioms
- creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing)
- 12. Materials creation
- Create lists of language patterns e.g. a list of irregular verbs ordered according to the frequency of occurrence
- Create test items instead of artificial unnatural ones for patterns taught
- Justify particular linguistic intuitions by authentic evidence
- Clarify stylistic problems in writing by illustrations
- 13. In the classroom
- Example sentences providing students with a large amount of example sentences
- Example sentences with gaps without the key words, so that they have to use their grammatical and lexical knowledge to fill the gaps
- categorize Many common words have a number of usages and meanings. Students can be given some concordances of a single word, and told to group them according to usage.
- 14. In the classroom 2
- Find the rule Rather than tell students a particular rule, students can be given a set of concordances and asked to discover for themselves what rules can be deduced from the evidence. This could be something simple such as discovering that the verb form changes the third person. In addition, this task can be done with more complex patterns such as collocations.
- As a computer quiz With the advent of cheap and free authoring software it is now possible to create ones own internet quizzes (see 'hot Potato'). With such software it is possible to create quizzes in which students have to fill gaps. Just as these gaps can be part of a larger passage of text, they can also be part of concordance lines. Furthermore, with these kinds of online 'tests' it is possible to give students instant feedback.
- categorize Many common words have a number of usages and meanings. Students can be given some concordances of a single word, and told to group them according to usage.
- 15. In the classroom 3
- Hot Potatoes http://www.nsknet.or.jp/~peterr-s/concordancing/onlineconcquiz/hotpotato/hp_efh_u06.htm
- 16. Conclusion
- Review conference schedule
- Distribute sign up sheet
- Review expectations for parent conferences
- Explain how you can be reached to discuss concerns