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Vocab Assessment &Corpora and Concordancing

Major vocabulary assessment tools Major corpora and concordancers

Vocabulary Assessment Vocabulary Assessment ToolsTools

1. What aspects of vocabulary knowledge are being tested in each of the tests?

2. Do you see any problems with some of the tests?

3. Do you use some of these tests in your school? What other assessment tools do your school use?

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Various vocabulary assessment tools

(available at http://www.lextutor.ca/tests/) Vocabulary Levels Tests (VLTs)

To check vocabulary size Tests of vocabulary of different levels of frequency

2000, 3000, 5000, 10000-word levels; AWL Aim at score of at least 80%

Word Association Test Meaning (different senses), collocations

Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) To check “quality” or “depth” of vocab knowledge

Vocab Profiler Lexical richness (type/token ratio) – more different

words More frequent words or more low-frequency words

Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS)

““retire”retire”

iii. I have seen this word before and I think it means iii. I have seen this word before and I think it means “stop working because of old age” “stop working because of old age” (3 pts)(3 pts)

iv. I know this word. It means “stop working because iv. I know this word. It means “stop working because of old age” of old age” (3 pts)(3 pts)

v. I can use this word in a sentence:v. I can use this word in a sentence:

He spent more time with his family after retire. He spent more time with his family after retire. (4 pts)(4 pts)

He spent more time with his family after he retired. He spent more time with his family after he retired. (5 (5 pts)pts)

He decided to retire. (? pts)He decided to retire. (? pts)

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VKS

Reporting scale: assume knowledge is linear-oriented

Self-reported in nature Level V: ability to produce sentence

with target vocab = ability to use the word appropriately?

DiscussionDiscussion

1. What is meant by a corpus in linguistics?

2. What is a concordancer?3. What information can you obtain

from using a corpus and concordancer?

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Use of ConcordancersUse of Concordancers

A corpus – a large collection of texts, written or spoken, stored on a computer.

A concordancer – a computer programme used to search this database To lemmatise a word (e.g. activate =

activates / activated / activating) To tag a word class to each word

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Considerations

General English / Academic English / Specialised English (e.g. medical and law corpora on LexTutor)?

Written / Spoken? Size? Currency? Free of charge?

Corpus SizeCorpus Size

“I don’t think there can be any corpora, however large, that contain information about all of the areas of English….that I want to explore [but] every corpus that I’ve had a chance to examine, however small, has taught me facts that I couldn’t imagine finding out about in any other way.” (Fillmore, 1992, p. 35)

Use of CorporaUse of Corpora Word lists and dictionary entries

(different senses of a word / typical examples of usage / frequency information) are compiled by computational linguists using a corpus of the language. E.g. In the 1980s, Collins started to use a computerised corpus

(then called the COBUILD corpus) with John Sinclair of University of Birmingham; now the Collins Cobuild Corpus has 2.5 billion words (part of which is the Bank of English Corpus (http://www.collinslanguage.com/collins-elt-learners-of-english/cobuild & http://www.mycobuild.com/about-collins-corpus.aspx)

E.g. Macmillan Dictionary: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/corpus.html

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Major corpus: BNC

100 million words Written (90%) and spoken (10%)

samples British English from the 1980’s to

1993 General English http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

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Major corpus: Bank of English 450 million words by 2005 75% written and 25% spoken 70% British, 20% American and 10%

others Contemporary English http://www.titania.bham.ac.uk/

docs/svenguide.html

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Major corpus: Brown corpus 1 million words American English One of the earliest corpora / compiled

in 1960s 500 text samples from 15 text

categories Searchable through LexTutor at

http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html

Major Corpus: The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) Contemporary American English

containing about 450 million words from 1990 to present http://www.americancorpus.org/

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Major corpus: MICASE

Spoken academic English http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/

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Major corus: International corpus of English East African English Indian English Singaporean English Hong Kong English http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/

ice/(requires registration before

downloading for free)

Some Some user-friendlyuser-friendly concordancersconcordancers

1. Word Neighbors (developed by University of Science and Technology)

2. www.just-the-word.com3. COCA4. Concordance on Lextutor

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Task

The public have expressed concern about … / … are of great concern to the public

Sufficient / clear / strong evidence Improve / increase / promote efficency Substitute for Sheer ( volume / numbers / rates /

amount / number )

TaskTask

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TaskTaskClimate meaning “weather conditions”: El Nino, a climate change associated with higher temperatures a temperate climate the climate of the polar regions …A figurative meaning of “climate” meaning “feelings /

sentiment” or “trend”: a climate of fear … Silvestrin’s passionately cold aesthetic should match the

architectural climate of the 1990s … economic climate election climate investment climate political climate the climate for negotiations

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How can corpora data be How can corpora data be used to facilitate vocabulary used to facilitate vocabulary

learning/teaching?learning/teaching?1. Study words in context and increase

depth of processing2. Check grammatical behaviour of words

e.g. what prepositions to use after a verb3. Check collocations and lexical patterns4. Find out about the different senses (e.g.

literal and figurative meaning) of a word5. Find out about the frequencies of words /

word combinations6. Find out about usage of a word in

different text types (e.g. fiction vs academic / spoken vs written)

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Other useful resources on the web

Lexipedia (for looking up related words)

Quizzes for ESL students http://a4esl.org/q/h/

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Bringing it all together

1. Vocabulary (Overview)2. Word frequency lists and vocabulary

size3. Mental lexicon4. Approaches to vocabulary teaching &

learning5. Vocabulary learning strategies6. Vocabulary assessment & Corpus and

concordancers Resources on Course Website

Post-course reflectionPost-course reflection

1. Given what we have discussed so far about vocabulary learning and teaching, would you do anything differently next term? What would you keep doing?

2. Are your students encouraged to learn vocabulary independently? Are they trained to use any VLS? Are you going to integrate VLS training into your curriculum?

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Submission of Submission of AssignmentAssignment

Deadline: October 26 Hard copy to Cecilia Soft copy via www.turnitin.com

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Course EvaluationCourse Evaluation

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