concordances for grammar awareness

Concordances for grammar awareness | Mike M. | September 28th, 2004

After reading a bit about the use of concordances for grammatical consciousness-raising (probably in Willis & Willis or Ellis) I gave two classes of my first-year university students a summer vacation task of looking at 10 pages of Cobuild concordance samples and making some observations about them. Here are the results of that assignment. Each page contained 40 samples for the phrases "because", "however", "and", "also", "but", "such as", "for example", and "besides", respectively. (All of these phrases are frequently misused or wrongly punctuated.)

There were three questions on each page:

1. How many instances of each phrase begin with a capital letter?
2. What punctuation is used before and after each phrase, and how many examples of each can you find?
3. Write anything you notice about the examples.

I was very impressed by the richness of their responses to question 3, which I have summarized and rephrased in the attached file. I don't know how much they have internalized, but they seem to have noticed an amazing number of details.

Has anyone else done anything similar? What other ways do people use concordances? How do the students react?

Mike McDonald

Re: Use of concordances | Paul Raper | September 29th, 2004

Mike,

Have you tried making your own concordances etc?

There is a great piece of software called Wordsmith, which allows you to do this. It's fantastic and an eye opener. There is a link to it at my site.

Section Other: Concordance

Paul

Re: Use of concordances | Mike McDonald | September 29th, 2004

Hi, Paul.

I downloaded WordSmith version 4 some time ago, but I never tried it out until yesterday. When I attempted to make a word frequency list, it only output 10 words, with some message to the effect that it was a demonstration version. I thought it was freeware, but apparently not. Anyway, it sounds as if it's worth the investment, so I'll fork out and try again.

Cheers,

Mike

Re: Use of concordances | Tisa | September 30th, 2004

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the great idea. I'm definitely going to try it out. You asked about other applications for concordances. I've tried calling up common phrasal verbs like 'bring up' and 'put up with' and then taking out either the particle (one) or the verb. I've then given the gapped version to various higher-level students to see what they make of it -- whether they can guess the particle or verb, what typically follows the phrasal verb, etc. It's challenging but I think it helps learners get a better feel for how we use these tricky items of vocabulary.

Thanks again for the tip.

Ciao!

Tisa

Re: Use of concordances | Mike McDonald | September 30th, 2004

I never thought of that! My students are a bit too low-level for any concentrated work on phrasal verbs, but I could certainly use your idea with prepositions or conjunctions. Thanks a lot!

Mike McDonald

Re: Use of concordances | Ramesh Krishnamurthy | October 2nd, 2004

Hi Mike,

I've now had a quick look at your students' comments on concordances. I see what you mean about the number of details, but I'm also impressed by the quality of some of the observations, especially about patterns.

a) the patterns with 'because of'

b) positions of 'however'

c) 'However, it is.' and 'However much of a ...'

d) 'and' links noun phrases, verbs, and clauses

e) positions of 'also'

[It may also be worth doing some contrastive exercises with 'however' and 'also', as the variation in their positions is different.]

f) 'also is used before verbs except 'be'

[I had a quick look in the Bank of English at 100 examples of 'also', and found this one:

instruments. Some musicians say it also is one of the most underrated.

which is clearly non-standard, BUT I also found these examples:

subsurface title. Inuit <p> will also be a partner with the federal <p>

Information Centre in London will also be liaising with the Government this

arms in the early 1980s, there have also been persistent reports that it

Enterprises Development Authority was also to be the apex policy making body

student's proficiency in language may also be evaluated through a senior essay

allegations of cronyism. Hardie had also been made to look ridiculous by the

So if you look at the data again with the students, it may be worth pointing

out that 'also' CAN be used before non-finite forms of "be".]

f) 'such as' comes before and after a noun

g) 'phrases in quotation marks after 'such as'

[another intriguing point. 100 egs from the Bank of English certainly confirms this:

pretty amazing mail to deal with. Such as: `I am 13 years old and very

Rather more colourful accusations - such as `Frenchmen as a rule do not enjoy

suggestions and opinions. Statements such as `How do you feel about it?" or `

reciting passages from the book such as: `A shot rang through the church

Even one example without the quotation marks:

are lobbying for a bypass, a comment such as, If traffic flow continues

So 'such as' is used as a way of expanding a noun phrase that refers to a piece of language (like mail, accusations, statements, passages in the examples).

Excellent stuff!

But it would be useful to check (at some point) how much of this information was internalized (how would one best measure that?).

Do let me know if you decide to do this. I'd be very interested in the results.

Best

Ramesh

Re: Use of concordances | Mike McDonald | October 2nd, 2004

Hi, Ramesh (I hope you'll excuse my using your first name)

Welcome to Aston (I'm assuming that you were somewhere else before) and thanks for your friendly message. I have often heard about WordSmith, and on Paul's recommendation I have just registered (for 50 pounds) and tried it out. Seems to be reasonably user-friendly.

Thanks for the list of references. I have the Tribble and Jones book already (unopened :-(), and I'll look out for the others.

I have attached the Word file in which I summarized the students' observations on the concordances I gave them.

I look forward to further contacts.

Best wishes,

Mike

[The following is from Ramesh's original message to Mike]

Or if you want to read more about the topic first, try any of the following:

Barlow, M. (1992). 'Using Concordance Software in Language Teaching and Research' In Shinjo, W. et al. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Foreign Language Education and Technology. Kasugai, Japan: LLAJ & IALL

Partington, A. (1998) Patterns and Meanings: Using Corpora for English Language Teaching and Research. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Bernardini, S. (2000) 'Systematising serendipity: Proposals for concordancing large corpora with language learners' In Burnard, L. & McEnery, T. (eds)

Rethinking Language Pedagogy from a Corpus Perspective. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Gavioli, L. (2001). 'The learner as a researcher:introducing corpus concordancing in the language classroom' In Aston, G. (ed.) Learning with corpora. Houston TX: Athelstan.

Higgins, J. & Johns, T. (1984). Computers in language learning. London: Collins ELT.

Johns, T. (1997). 'Contexts: the Background, Development and Trialling of a Concordance-based CALL ProgramAf In Wichmann, A., Fligelstone, S., McEnery, T. & Knowles, G. (eds.)

Teaching and Language Corpora. London and New York: Longman.

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

Sinclair, J.M. (1997). Reading concordances. London: Addison Wesley Longman.

Tribble, C. & Jones, G. (1997). Concordances in the Classroom: using corpora. A resource guide for teachers. Houston, TX: Athelstan.

Tribble, C. (1997). 'Getting started with concordancing' In Boswood, T. (ed.) New Ways in using Computers in ESL. New York: TESOL.

Best

Ramesh

Bits and bobs | Francesca Michalski | October 2nd, 2004

Hi all,

Concordance folk : I've used concordances but not for a while and your discussion has raised my interest again. I used to give students homework to look up specific words on the Cobuild site and see what they could learn from the examples and then to share their findings the next class. Can one still use the Cobuild service for free ? I tried recently without success. Is there any free software available ?

Thanks,

Francesca

Re: Bits and Bobs | Mike McDonald | October 2nd, 2004

Francesca,

The Cobuild online concordancer seems to have been non-functional for a long time. Here are a few other free online concordancers you can try:

VLC Edict Web Concordancer

British National Corpus Search

Michigan Corpus of Spoken English Search

By the way, there is an Aston site for accessing the TESOL Quarterly.

Cheers,

Mike

Re: Bits and Bobs | Ramesh Krishnamurthy | October 4th, 2004

Hi Francesca

Craig in Japan says he has no problem in accessing the Cobuild free concordance and collocation facility (which apparently came back into service recently after a long gap- the "old" website).

The "new" website

Both of these work for him. But I have tried several times, and nothing happens when I type in searchwords...

The BNC offers 50 free concordances, but presents examples in full-sentence format (rather than KWIC - Key Word In Context), which makes patterns much more difficult to spot.

Best

Ramesh

Re: Bits and Bobs | Konstantin | October 4th, 2004

Hi folks,

This is my first time on this discussion list. My name is Konstantin, and I am in Japan. I am currently taking the LEX module, thus I have an interest in concordances for my assignment.

Regarding the Cobuild links provided by Craig and Ramesh above, both work for me from here in Japan (interesting point?). But, they are limited to 40 lines, and it is always the same 40 lines.

I have found the BNC site to be the most useful so far You get 50 lines randomly selected. So, if you need more you can repeat the search and collect lines to get as many as you need to look at for an assignment. I have been saving the lines in Word .doc file and then saving the .doc file as a .txt file for processing with ATA (Aston Text Analyser). The .txt file can also be imported into Excel for alphanumeric ordering/sorting and checking for duplicate entries. Useful.

I have tried other things as well, though not very successfully.

BNC also provides a program called SARA that allows you to analyze the corpus at their site. I have yet to get SARA to run without freezing, and have decided to stop wasting my time.

I also tried the Brown University Corpus. It is stated on their site that you can get a full list of concordances in multiple pages of 100 lines. I have only ever been able to get 1 page, though.

In doing all of my searching, one thing has surprised me. And that is, how much of a "big business" thing copora are. Quite the contrast to the impression of an academic tool for teachers and a learning tool for students I got from the LEX module and readings.

Finally, Paul, yes, I would like to get you BNC from your ftp site. Can you tell me how to do this?

Pleasure to introduce myself,

Konstantin

Re: Use of concordances | Mike McDonald | October 9th, 2004

Paul Raper wrote:

Have you tried making your own concordances etc? There is a great piece of software called Wordsmith which allows you to do this. It's fantastic and an eye opener.

I have not had time to explore WordSmith yet, but I have a vague idea and would welcome any feedback.

I teach in the Computer Science faculty of a Japanese university. Each semester, every staff member announces a particular project, and students are free to choose which project to join. The general idea is for the students to work independently or in groups towards some particular goal, under the supervision of a teacher. My groups generally have fewer than 10 members.

Since we have several non-Japanese-speaking teaching staff, and some of the required reading is in English, there is a need for our students to be able to process technical English, both spoken and written. However, their vocabulary is generally quite small, and they have great difficulty in understanding some of the professors and materials.

My idea is to get the students to create an online glossary of the most frequent technical terms used in their field, for the use of all our students. It would involve the use of a technical corpus, WordSmith, HTML, and an English-Japanese online dictionary/concordance such as Eijiro. The students would use WordSmith to extract the most frequent words from the corpus, eliminate the non-technical terms, list the technical terms in an HTML document, and supply Japanese translations or glosses.

Some of the questions that occur to me are:

1. How should I select a technical corpus? What kind of size of corpus would be practical? Would it work to ask the students to supply the texts? Or should I ask the non-Japanese professors to supply samples of their own papers?

2. Can WordSmith handle pdf and doc file types, or do files have to be in txt format?

3. What size of glossary would be practical? 100 entries? 500 entries? 1000 entries?

4. Is WordSmith capable of handling multi-word terms in determining word frequencies?

5. What items would be most useful to include in each entry of the glossary?

If anyone has experience of such a project, or ideas on how to go about it, I would be glad to hear from them.

Mike McDonald

Re: Use of concordances | Paul Raper | October 10th, 2004

Hi Mike,

It sounds to me as though you have quite a project on your hands. WordSmith is relatively limited in the file types it can handle. Someone might like to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it can only cope with TXT files. Its functions really are to purely analyze texts for concordance, collocations, word repetitions etc.

For your idea I might start to look elsewhere. Here I can offer you the benefit of my wife's expertise as a technical translator. I might suggest that the organization invest in either: a Trados or Star Transit glossar package. Here the organization could allow the students to set up just the kind of thing you are thinking about. Both products have the benefits of being able to cope with multiple file formats, and to be able to integrate with standard word processing packages.

The down sides are that as with anything that can cope with such a wide range of situations, they are more complicated to work with, and more expensive.

There are also some simplified English versions on the market, but my aversion to these is based on the fact that Simplified English tries to: Set one translation/meaning per word and limits the tenses that are permissible, not to mention banishes the passive to the dark mountains.

If it's of interest I can give you website address for Trados and Transit. Simplified English can be found in a variety of places. There are a lot of people pushing that one about.

I hope this helps and doesn't blur the issue.

Paul

COBUILD Concordance sampler | Paul Raper | October 26th, 2004

This may interest some of you.

I hope those of you in Japan are all ok. It seems you have been having a tough time of it lately.

Best wishes and stay safe.

:-)

Paul

Earlier in the year, you contacted us about the Cobuild collocations and concordances sampler. We are pleased to tell you that it is now available again.

The display is different from the previous version, with each concordance line shown in a box. We have plans to improve the display by making the node word bold for greater ease of use.

The only problem reported so far is that the results of searches are displayed in a popup window, and many browsers now have pop-ups cancelled as default. If you enter a search and get no result, you need to enable pop-ups.

concordances for grammar awareness