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Concordancers in language teaching
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Tue, 03/17/2009 - 00:07
Dear all,
I will appreciate it if someone tell me about the role of concordancers in language teaching.
Do you generally implement such things as concordancers, word counting and statistical processing tools inyour teaching or not?
What kind of activities could be done with the help of concordancers and how can they help both teachers and students?
Did you, for example, ever try to make a collection of corpus texts and then build the main target vocabulary for your students with the help of concordancers? Is it possible to check written works online if we use concordancers and how successful it may be?
What internet resources do you know for online concordancers? Is there a free downloadable version of concordancers?
This subject is particularly interesting to me. I would love to know more about that.
Looking forward to your comments and suggestions.
Best,
Nataliya
Wed, 03/18/2009 - 01:27
#2
Hi Olwyn,
Many thanks for your answer. You clarified me the point actually. Your experience is very interesting. I can use it in my teaching too. I think now that it could be also great to use it for scientific purposes. Fantastic!
Thanks a lot.
Nataliya
Thu, 03/19/2009 - 16:01
#3
Hi Olwyn and Nataliya,
This is the first time I have heard about concordancers, and would very much appreciate it if you could give me an example on how you use it in class.
I had a look at the EAP forum and registered at the British National Corpus, but still can't make heads or tails of it. What activities do you use? Are there any links with lesson plans using this software?
Apologies for my ignorance :-(
Ta ever so,
Sahar
Thu, 03/19/2009 - 21:53
#4
Hi, Sahar, Nataliya, and Olwyn!
I must claim my ignorance as well. And I would like to join Olwyn in her asking to show us how you use concordances and the such in your practice.
Looking forward to your reply,
Anastasia.
Thu, 03/19/2009 - 22:35
#5
Hi, Sahar, Nataliya, and Anastasia,
I use concordances to help students to see the grammar of words, specifically collocations. I designed a set of EAP vocabulary tasks recently to help students to see how to use the words hazard, harm and risk accurately and appropriately. It is clear that these words are related, e.g. a hazard has the potential to cause harm; risk is the likelihood of harm occurring but what different forms are frequent, e.g. harmful/harmless, and what are the common collocations?
We have a corpus of texts drawn from distance learning materials in science and engineering that contain large numbers of instances of these words in real sentences. The concordancer samples these texts and produces concordance lines which show the search word in its context. I listed the example sentences and then asked students to 'look left - look right' to find verbs, nouns, adjectives and phrases which collocate with these words. Examples of the kinds of things we find are:
hazardous to health; biological hazards; hazards in the workplace; harm to hearing; harm from exposure to...; pose a health hazard; be exposed to hazards; be at risk
Concordance software can also show how frequent each of these are and therefore what is worth spending time learning.
I would not be able to come up with these ideas through intuition alone, or even by checking in the dictionary where the words are not listed together, and I would be unlikely to find one text that contained all this useful language. Once students are used to using concordancers they can be directed to some of the free websites to explore vocabulary for themselves.
Olwyn
Fri, 03/20/2009 - 01:58
#6
Hi Olwyn, Anastasia and Sahar,
Thank you all for participation in this disscussion.
Thank you Olwyn so much for your thorough explanation and examples. I personally started using concordances not long ago. I encourage my students to check collocations and word combinations, etc on there own with the help of concordances while preparing different written tasks. I've never designed excercises or course materials using concordances myself yet but I'd love to experiment with these things. Could be very interesting.
Does anyone use concordances for scientific researches of any kind?
Looking forward to your reply.
Best,
Natalia
Fri, 03/20/2009 - 03:08
#7
Dear All--
Concordances are indeed a great tool! I've been using them in my writing classes to help students see how words combine and what contexts they are used in. I've been using the tools you can find at http://www.lextutor.ca/. I'm inviting you to have a look at some of the tools you get access to from lextutor, for example, the simplest is the tool that let's you enter a word and get a concordance page. Something you can do with it is take away the key word, for example, and let your Ss guess it first and then discuss patterns of its use and meaninings. This is a vocabulary exercise, but you can also use this tool to create grammar exercises, of course, if you need.
It would be great if you spent some time researching the tools offered by lextutor, and then we can share our ideas about using them.
Natalya Eydelman
Sat, 03/21/2009 - 18:33
#8
Dear Natalia, Olwyn and all...
I am ever so grateful for your thorough explanation and ideas. I have checked lextutor, though it looked too much at first but I found the I-D word Identification quiz interesting and challenging. I will be using it with my classes.
I also think using the concordances for finding collocations and expressions a brilliant idea, as in the realm of every day teaching, one can run out of ideas and it would take ages to brainstorm a list of expressions to be used in class!!
Ta ever so,
Sahar :-)
Sat, 03/28/2009 - 18:00
#9
Hi all,
Sorry to be joining so late but better late than never :) i work for a language school in Moscow but my particular interest at the moment is BE and trying to incorporate some technology into my lessons. I've been using concordnaces for a while, and although my students took a bit of time to get used to the layout, they now find it a really useful way of working out how things are said and how frequently they're used. I have to admit, that with my lower levels, eg Int, Upp Int, i do go through myself and find appropriate examples with language that they can understand otherwise they get a bit overwhelmed and the whole lesson degenerates into a "what does this mean? What's this word?" but higher levels are better able to deal with the whole and get a lot from it.
There's a good business letter concordnace at http://www.someya-net.com/concordancer/, this is one my students find really useful when trying to write their own business letters.
Am really enjoying the discussions so far, such a great opportunity to share and learn :)
Jo
Sat, 03/28/2009 - 19:50
#10
Hi Jo!
Thanks for the useful business letter concordnace. I used to teach Business English at Moscow State Uni way back in 1998. In those days tutors had limited access to resources( i.e. photo copiers/computers/videos) Most university exams were orals.
Still, my Russian students were extremely motivated and a real pleasure to teach. I'll never forget that academic year.It was truly memorable.
Regards,
Anita
Sun, 03/29/2009 - 22:30
#11
Hi Jo and Anita!
Many thanks, Jo, for the site! Very useful for me! I've never come across it before. Great!
Speaking about Moscow State Uni, Anita, I've been teaching there just about 3 years ago (the first humanitarian building) and the situation was very much the same. Limited access to everything and only blackboards to write chalk on them.-)))
Best,
Nataliya
Hi Nataliya,
There's a discussion on concordancers next door in the EAP forum as well and some examples available on the web. Personally I think a corpus of texts and some concordance software should be absolutely essential for any materials writer, otherwise how can they know what langauge to choose to put in their coursebook or classroom materials?
I wrote some distance learning materials for an Academic English for Business course a few years ago. We had access to all the first year business studies texts, written by lecturers. What surprised us was the formal and complex style of the language in these texts, even at first year level - so many noun phrases for students to understand.This insight made us concentrate more on noun grammar than verb grammar.
Olwyn