Concordancing at

Upper-Intermediate Levels

What it is not

What you will get from this talk

Natural Grammar

Natural Grammar

For Learner Autonomy“As learners start to get used to the idea of grammar as

being contingent on certain high frequency key words, encourage them to keep a record of these words in the notebooks – or even a special notebook for key words.

They should devote a whole page to each word.As they encounter examples of the word, for example, in

course book texts, or in their general reading and listening, they should record it in the book, preferably in such a way as to display its patterns. ….

…If possible, ask them to categorise these examples according to the categories in Natural Grammar. In this way, learners produce their own, customised, version of Natural Grammar.” – Thornbury, OUP ELT Natural Grammar site

The thorny issue of methodologies

• Communicative Language Teaching

• Grammar Translation or Data-Driven Learning?

• A balance of Process and Product

Concordancers

• British National Corpus• Collins´s• Phrases in English• The Compleat Lexical Tutor• Micase Concordance Search• WebCorp• Papyr• VIEW

If you don’t want to write this down, the

names and URLs are in the handout.

British National Corpus

Type in your word and press ‘enter.’

Collins’s Collocation and Concordance Sampler

Phrases in English

The Compleat Lexical Tutor

Micase Concordance Search

WebCorp

Papyr

Variation In English Words and Phrases

Tabs or Tags

… more TABS, part of speech codes and other search tips

+ ~ ? * { } & -

The system in one of the search engines in VIEWexpansion to right –  ^by[[:>:]]   matches phrases starting in the word by

expansion to left –  [[:<:]]floor$   matches phrases ending in the word floor

When doing a simple search, what do you type in for simple three or four word phrases that include the and days?

The Answer …

the ~ ~ days

Another search question

What do you type in if you want single letter variations of exactly one character that begin with ‘s’ and end with ‘ng’?

s?ng

Every Search is Different…the principle is the same

Query SyntaxA query is made up of one or more terms concatenated with a + symbol.

E.g.hell+hole would search for the word "hell" immediately followed by the word "hole".

Terms may be made up of simple alphabetic strings, optionally modified with a trailing asterisk or 'at'-symbol, concatenated and separated by

vertical bars, or followed by an oblique stroke and a part-of-speech tag.Word combinations

The plus may be modified with a preceding number to indicate the maximum number

of intervening words. E.g. dog+4bark will search for "dog" followed by "bark" with up to 4 words intervening.

Inflected FormsAn at-sign (@) appended to a string of letters causes the software to expand the word

form preceding the @ symbol into a set of inflected forms. For example, the query blew@+away

will search for the set of words blow blows blowing blew followed by the word away.

Helping Teachers with Difficult Grammar Questions

•Verb patterns (is it the gerund or the infinitive?)

•Prepositions

•Reported speech

•Relative clauses

•Articles

Classroom Ideas

•Preparing tailor-made exercises that respond to your students’ needs

•Learners design their own exercises (knowledge construction through learning projects)

•Peer or self-correction

•Deducing meaning, connotation and/or grammatical features of pairs of words (see and watch, for example)

•What is the grammar rule? (a discovery approach)

•Genre Awareness exercises eg based on a word with a specific meaning, doing a search for that word and evaluating its context

•Word searches for stories in different newspapers

Thank you