MA ELTAM Week 6

Concordances and Data Driven Learning

Useful Web Sites for instant results

Collins Cobuild Corpus Concordance Sampler

http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx

This site will give 40 concordance lines for any word or query typed in. It uses a ‘small’ corpus of 56 million words of contemporary written and spoken data. Unfortunately it is temporarily disabled but you might like to try these queries when it is up an running again.

Suggested queries:

1. Compare the collocations of ‘happened’ , ‘occurred’, and ‘took+place’

2. Look for antonyms in the search ‘ whether+6or’ ( +6 means that there can be up to six words intervening between 'whether' and 'or')

3. Find the proportion of uses of the word ‘web’ where it means 'something a spider makes'. What does this tell you about this word?

4. Type the key words of an idiom your students might know (eg 'raining cats and dogs') and see if it is commonly used. Can you find interesting adaptations of the idiom?

British National Corpus On-line service

http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html

This site introduces the 100 million word BNC. The on-line service gives you complete sentences for 50 hits of the word or phrase requested. The texts used all date from around 1990 and this is reflected in the results for more recent arrivals in English.

Suggested queries:

1. Look up ‘web’ – what kinds of meaning do you find? What does this tell you about the corpus?

2. Compare the collocations of ‘happened’ , ‘occurred’, and ‘took+place’.

3. Collect 5 sentences with the word ‘ interested’ and 5 sentences with the word ‘interesting’. Put them in a Word document. Use these to make a Jcloze exercise.

Corpus Data Sources

Below are a selection of key addresses of sites where you can get information about corpus data:

1. ICAME Academic Corpora of English at the University of Bergen in Norway.

http://www.hd.uib.no/icame.html

2. Project Gutenburg - a huge non-copyright text resource

http://www.promo.net/pg/

3. The European Corpus Initiative - a Multilingual Corpus for scientific research

http://www.elsnet.org/resources/eciCorpus.html

4. The International Corpus of English

A million words of spoken or written data for several countries. The British version is available at the Survey of English Usage, University College London

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice.htm

5. Corpus holdings at the University of Lancaster

Access to many corpora including the LOB and Brown corpora

http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/ucrel/corpora.html

Concordancing Programs

Below are a selection of addresses of sites where you can get information about or actually download the concordancers mentioned'

1. MicroConcord – free but not mouse-friendly (looks like DOS)

http://www.liv.ac.uk/~ms2928/software/

2. WordSmith Tools – most commonly-used commercial package

http://www4.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-459286-3

3. AntConc – free and highly recommended – easy to use

http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html

4. MonoConc 1.5 – commercial product

http://www.athel.com/mono.html#mono%20class=

5. Links to many other programs and resources

http://users.otenet.gr/~damker/concord1.htm

     6. A Website for all kinds of Corpus and Vocbulary related resources

http://www.lextutor.ca/

     7. Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds!

 http://www.wordle.net/

Selected books on corpora and language

Baker, M., G.Francis & E.Tognini-Bonelli (eds) 1993 Text and technology. In honour of John Sinclair Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Hoey, M. (ed.) 1993 Data, Description, Discourse Harper Collins

Hunston S and Francis G. 1999. Pattern Grammar: A corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Sinclair J.M. 1991. Corpus Concordance Collocation. Oxford: OUP.

Stubbs M 1996. Text and Corpus Analysis. Oxford: Blackwells.

Selected Books and articles specific to English Language Teaching

Aston, Guy, 1995, 'Corpora in language pedagogy: matching theory and practice' in G. Cook and B. Seidlhofer (eds.) Principle and practice in Applied Linguistics: Studies in honour of H.G. Widdowson (Oxford University Press, pp. 257-270).

Aston, Guy, 1996, 'The British National Corpus as a Language Learner Resource' in Botley, Glass, McEnery & Wilson (eds.) 1996, pp, 178-191.

Aston, Guy, 1997, 'Enriching the learning environment: corpora as resources for ELT' in Wichmann, Fligelstone, McEnery and Knowles (eds.)

Barlow M 1996. ‘Corpora for theory and practice’ International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 1: 1-37.

Fligelstone, Steve. 1993. Some reflections on the question of teaching, from a corpus linguistics perspective. ICAME Journal 17:97-109.

Flowerdew, John, 1996, 'Concordancing in Language Learning', in Martha Pennington (ed.) The Power of CALL (Athelstan), pp. 97-113.

Higgins, John, 1991a, 'Looking for Patterns' in Johns & King (eds.) 1991, pp. 63-70.

Hunston, S., 2002, Corpora in Applied Linguistics Cambridge:CUP.

Johns, T. 1986, 'Microconcord: a language-learner's research tool'. System 14/2, pp. 151-162.

Johns, T. 1988. Whence and Whither Classroom Concordancing? In T. Bongaerts et al (eds.) Computer Applications in Language Learning. Dordrecht: Foris.

Johns, T. and P. King (eds.), 1991, Classroom Concordancing (Birmingham University: English Language Research Journal 4).

Kerr, J., 1992, 'Using concordancing software with ESL learners', ON-CALL 6/3 pp. 2-7.

Kettemann, B. 1995, 'On the Use of Concordancing in ELT' TELL&CALL 1995/4, pp. 4-15.

Kettemann, B. 1996. 'Concordancing in English Language Teaching' in Botley, Glass, McEnery & Wilson (eds.)1996, pp. 4-16.

Levy, Mike, 1990, 'Concordances and their integration into a word-processing environment for language learners', System 8/2, pp. 177-188.

Ma, Bruce C.K., 1993, 'Small Corpora Concordancing in ESL Teaching and Learning', Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching 16, pp. 11-30.

Meyer, Renee, Mary-Ellen Okurowski and Therese Hand, 1996, 'Using Athentic Corpora and Language Tools for Adult-centred Learning' in Botley, Glass, McEnery & Wilson (eds.) 1996, pp. 171-177.

Milton, John, 1996, 'Exploiting L1 and L2 corpora for Computer Assisted Language Learning Design: the role of an interactive hypertext grammar' in Botley, Glass, McEnery & Wilson (eds.) 1996, pp. 233-243.

Mindt, Dieter, 1986, 'Corpus, Grammar, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language' in Gerhard Leitner (ed.) The English Reference Grammar: Language and Linguistics, Writers and Readers (Tubingen) pp. 125-139.

Mparutsa, Cynthia, Alison Love & Andrew Morrison, 1991, 'Bringing Concord to the ESP Classroom' in Johns & King (eds.) 1991, pp. 115-134.

Murison-Bowie, S. 1993, 'Concordancing Corner 1: What is Concordancing and Why Should We Do It?' TELL&CALL 1993/4.

Murison-Bowie, S., 1996, 'Linguistic corpora and language teaching' Annual Review of Allied Linguistics 16, pp.182-199.

Nattinger, J. R. and J. S. Decarrico. 1992. Lexical phrases and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peters, Carol, Eugenio Picchi & Lisa Biagni , 1996, 'Parallel and Comparable Bilingual Corpora in Language Teaching and Learning' in Botley, Glass, McEnery & Wilson (eds.) 1996, pp. 68-82..

Pickard, V., 1994, 'Producing a concordance-based self-access vocabulary package: some problems and solutions' in L. Flowerdew & KK. Tong (eds.) Entering Text (Language Centre, Hong Kong Unversity of Science and Technology), pp. 215-226.

Stevens, V. 1991a, 'Classroom concordancing: vocabulary materials derived from relevant, authentic text', English for Specific Purposes 10, pp. 10-15.

Stevens, V. 1991b, ''Concordance-based Vocabulary exercises: a Viable Alternative to Gap-filling' in Johns & King (eds.) 1991, pp. 47-61.

Stevens, V. 1995. Concordancing with Language Learners: Why? When? What? CAELL Journal, 6,2: 2-10.

Tribble C. 1997, 'Corpora, Concordances and ELT' in Boswood T (ed) New Ways in teaching with computers, TESOL, 1997

Tribble C. 2000 'Practical Uses for Language Corpora' in P. Brett and G. Motteram (eds.) A Special Interest in Computers Whitstable: IATEFL

Tribble C. and Jones G. 1997 Concordances in the Classroom. Houston: Athelstan

Wichmann A, Fligelstone S, McEnery T and Knowles G. (eds.) 1997. Teaching and Language Corpora. London: Longman.

Willis D. 1990 The Lexical Syllabus: a new approach to language teaching. London: HarperCollins.

The two articles below challenge the use of corpora in language teaching:

Cook G. 1998. ‘The uses of reality: a reply to Ronald Carter’ ELTJ 52/1 pp: 57-64.

Owen, Charles, 1996, 'Do concordances require to be consulted?', ELT journal, 50/3, pp. 219-224.