3 Concordances in the classroom without a computer: assembling and exploiting
3.7 Enhancing the process
This section looks at how the process of generating and exploiting hand- assembled concordances can be organised, systematised and varied.
3.7.1 Selecting words for concordancing
• Once you become familiar with your frequency lists, you will find it easier to scan a text and pick out suitable words. You will probably find that words from the top 50 or so frequency band are generally the most fruitful, but look out for others from the list too.
• If you are teaching ESP, try to find frequency lists for your special- ist area.
• Try to cover as many of the frequent words as you can; some words can be focused on several times, with different types of text, and learners can still make new discoveries.
• Keep a record (for each class you teach) of words covered, together with the meanings and uses of those words. The best way to do this is to print or copy out your frequency list, well spaced, and use it as a checklist; adding beside each word the meanings and patterns of that word and the date that you covered each one. By doing this you are, in fact, building up a post hoc lexical syllabus and ensuring balanced coverage – as it is easier to identify the gaps.
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• Keep copies of the concordances and activities to use with other classes working with the same pedagogic corpus. You can also use them to develop test items.
If you can gain access to a computer and corpus software, for example AntConc, AWL Highlighter, WebCONC, Web Concordancer, WordSmith tools (for details see Chapter 2 Appendix), you can input your own pedagogic corpora. (Learners can be asked to help with this.) Look out for concordancing programs which also identify frequent phrases (e.g.
‘n-grams’ of 2–6 words). The concordancer can generate a word fre- quency list for each text or group of texts, so you can use that, together with its concordancing facility, to help you select words or phrases from those texts for students to focus on. Alternatively, you can simply print out the concordances for the class to analyse and classify.
3.7.2 Varying the focus and process You can vary:
• the number of words you focus on in a session;
• the number of texts you investigate each time: single current text, recently used texts or the whole pedagogic corpus covered to date;
• the type of text: spoken, written or both;
• the types of word focused on each time: (prepositions, conjunctive items, adverbs, etc.) or parts of words (-ing, -ed, -ly, -s, -er, -est);
• student groupings: for example, the whole class collecting one word (from different texts), or groups responsible for different words, or on a rota basis, with each student responsible for a different word each week;
• method of display: ‘word-sheets’ round the walls – one for each word, to be added to (categories can be built up) as more texts are covered, or OHP transparencies with overlays presented to the class;
• timing: assembling concordances in a lesson or in advance of the lesson;
• the analysis activities set on the concordances: general or specific (see sessions 1 and 2 above) with or without given categories. (For more types of consciousness-raising activities see Willis 1990, 2003);
• extension and consolidation: with/without reference to dictionaries and grammars; students can be encouraged to build up their own phrase books or dictionaries, and/or to look for more examples in their outside reading or in other contacts with the language;
• testing activities: for example, blanking out common words in mixed sets of concordance lines from familiar texts; lines chosen by student or teacher or picked at random from an item bank built up by the class.
Concordances in the classroom
71 3.8 From pedagogic corpus to a balanced syllabus
It is essential that the data forming your learners’ pedagogic corpus constitutes a representative sample of the language they will be using in their target discourse communities, in ‘real life’ situations. If the language of some of the texts and recordings from the class coursebook is over-simplified or unnatural (e.g. written to illustrate the use of one particular grammar structure), you should consider omitting these and supplementing your coursebook with reading texts and listening mat- erials of a more authentic nature from other sources to balance your pedagogic corpus.
But how can teachers selecting supplementary materials ensure that these, together with appropriate coursebook texts and recordings, will offer a thorough and balanced coverage of the language features, words, meanings, patterns and uses their students need? How can materials writers ensure that their coursebook materials do offer a representa- tive sample of language? If, say, you are assembling a general course on spoken English, how can you ensure that the recordings you use offer a balanced sample of spoken English?
A pedagogic corpus is inevitably quite small and needs to be selected in a principled manner. If, for example, you are teaching gen- eral English, you should ensure that there is not an overdue empha- sis on planned, edited spoken monologue (e.g. radio documentary, rehearsed interviews) or purely transactional talk. There is a danger of including too much data of this kind (often because it is more easily accessible) at the expense of spontaneous spoken interaction, where turn-taking and topic-shifting is free and relatively unpredict- able (see Chapter 4 in this book by Ronald Carter, Rebecca Hughes and Michael McCarthy).
Ideally what is needed is information derived from a larger research corpus, one that is representative of the type of language the learners will be needing. A large corpus (whether spoken or written, general or specialist) can give us information about the frequency of word forms and their typical patterns and uses. Armed with a checklist derived from a larger corpus, we can then aim to collect a pedagogic corpus which reflects these patterns and uses – a language ‘microcosm’. If the pedagogic corpus can then be put on to a computer and analysed, the frequency lists can be compared, and typical examples of, say, the most frequent 2,000–3,000 words (as identified by the research corpus) can be selected from its concordances. If words or uses of words are found to be missing, we can try to select additional recordings/texts or design exercises that aim to fill the gaps. It is impossible to achieve a 100 per cent match between the pedagogic corpus and the research corpus, but a
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principled approach to corpus design is more likely to cover the lan- guage that students need than an approach which selects texts and lan- guage focus points in a more random fashion. See Willis and Willis (2007: 187–98) for more on the syllabus design process.
It is impossible for most language teachers and course designers to assemble their own research corpus for a particular group of learners, unless the learners’ target discourse is a very narrow, well-defined area which is readily researchable. But there is a growing range of more specialist language corpora with frequency lists already assembled (see Chapter 2 Appendix for sources) and over the next few years more will be made available for public use. It is, however, possible to aim at assembling the learners’ own pedagogic corpus, that is, one that reflects as far as possible their target language needs, even without the insights gained from a computational analysis of a research corpus.
The most frequent words, meanings and patterns are obviously going to be the most useful for learners and give the most efficient coverage of the target discourse. But in addition to the criterion of frequency, we need to take into account factors such as learnability and learners’
immediate interests. Thus the syllabus might well include words that are similar in the two languages, and words from topic areas and types of text (e.g. sport, pop songs, magazine pieces) that students find moti- vating. Such texts would then become part of the pedagogic corpus, and would undoubtedly also serve to illustrate more common uses of common words.
To further increase their vocabulary and to extend their experience of language, individual learners should always be encouraged to read (and listen) more widely on their own, and to look out for more exam- ples of specific features from outside data, but since this will be part of the individual learner’s corpus, and unfamiliar to other learners, it would not form part of the pedagogic corpus available for concordance analysis.