1 Vocab Assessment & Corpora and Concordancing Major vocabulary assessment tools Major corpora and concordancers

Vocabulary Assessment Tools What aspects of vocabulary knowledge are being tested in each of the tests? Do you see any problems with some of the tests? Do you use some of these tests in your school? What other assessment tools do your school use? 2

3 Various vocabulary assessment tools (available at Vocabulary Levels Tests (VLTs) To check vocabulary size Tests of vocabulary of different levels of frequency 2000, 3000, 5000, 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” iii. I have seen this word before and I think it means “stop working because of old age” (3 pts) iv. I know this word. It means “stop working because of old age” (3 pts) v. I can use this word in a sentence: He spent more time with his family after retire. (4 pts) He spent more time with his family after he retired. (5 pts) He decided to retire. (? pts) 4

5 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?

Discussion What is meant by a corpus in linguistics? What is a concordancer? What information can you obtain from using a corpus and concordancer? 6

Use 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

8 Considerations General English / Academic English / Specialised English (e.g. medical and law corpora on LexTutor)? Written / Spoken? Size? Currency? Free of charge?

Corpus 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 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 ( learners-of-english/cobuild & corpus.aspx) learners-of-english/cobuildhttp:// corpus.aspx E.g. Macmillan Dictionary:

11 Major corpus: BNC 100 million words Written (90%) and spoken (10%) samples British English from the 1980’s to 1993 General English

12 Major corpus: Bank of English 450 million words by % written and 25% spoken 70% British, 20% American and 10% others Contemporary English html html

13 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 d_e.html d_e.html

Major Corpus: The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) Contemporary American English containing about 450 million words from 1990 to present 14

15 Major corpus: MICASE Spoken academic English

16 Major corus: International corpus of English East African English Indian English Singaporean English Hong Kong English (requires registration before downloading for free)

Some user-friendly concordancers Word Neighbors (developed by University of Science and Technology) COCA Concordance on Lextutor 17

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 )

Task 19

Task Climate 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 20

How can corpora data be used to facilitate vocabulary learning/teaching? Study words in context and increase depth of processing Check grammatical behaviour of words e.g. what prepositions to use after a verb Check collocations and lexical patterns Find out about the different senses (e.g. literal and figurative meaning) of a word Find out about the frequencies of words / word combinations Find out about usage of a word in different text types (e.g. fiction vs academic / spoken vs written)

22 Other useful resources on the web Lexipedia (for looking up related words) Quizzes for ESL students

23 Bringing it all together Vocabulary (Overview) Word frequency lists and vocabulary size Mental lexicon Approaches to vocabulary teaching & learning Vocabulary learning strategies Vocabulary assessment & Corpus and concordancers Resources on Course Website

Post-course reflection Given what we have discussed so far about vocabulary learning and teaching, would you do anything differently next term? What would you keep doing? 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? 24

Submission of Assignment Deadline: October 26 Hard copy to Cecilia Soft copy via 25

Course Evaluation 26