This workshop was given to staff at a Gulf College to introduce the EFL staff to the world of concordancing.
Citation preview
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
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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)
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4. Concordancer
a computer program that automatically constructs a
concordance
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5. Corpus
body of texts available for examination
Single
For item analysis
Parallel
For linguistic language comparison
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6. Corpus Characteristics
Should have a descriptive header
Raw or unannotated
Annotated
Tags, similar to
Tags indicate; parts of speech
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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
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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"
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9. Concordancers
WordSmith Tools
Microconcord
Monoconc
Collins CoBuild
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10. Web based concordancers
Web based concordancer
http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/
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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)
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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
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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.
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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.
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15. In the classroom 3
Hot Potatoes
http://www.nsknet.or.jp/~peterr-s/concordancing/onlineconcquiz/hotpotato/hp_efh_u06.htm
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16. Conclusion
Review conference schedule
Distribute sign up sheet
Review expectations for parent conferences
Explain how you can be reached to discuss concerns