for Materials Design The Theory & Practice of Concordancing

Richard S. Lavin Prefectural University of Kumamoto

Create materials for a new graduate school reading course. Students from more than 10 different disciplines under broad umbrella of Environmental Science. Goals & situation

Easy Quick Low cost Customizable Preferably learnable by students Criteria

All students need to be able to read science texts For this they need: general English vocabulary (GSL or LDV) academic vocabulary (AWL) specialist vocabulary More on purpose and teaching context

Students of widely differing abilities & learning histories Preparation for a 2nd semester writing course Allow students to create own syllabus More on purpose & context

Graded readers LDV and basic sentence patterns Analysis of specialist texts Concordancing, etc. Summarizing/translation of scientific texts better done after analysis of same texts Three-part syllabus

Johns, T. F. (1994) From printout to handout: grammar and vocabulary teaching in the context of data-driven learning. In Odlin, T. (ed.), Perspectives on pedagogical grammar. New York: Cambridge University Press. Data-driven learning

Hadley, G. (1997) Sensing the winds of change: an introduction to data-driven learning. Available from Data-driven learning

Focusing on words and then on how they are used in sources chosen by students may increase motivation. Students can learn a little grammar by stealth. Approaches to grammar teaching

Find suitable texts Create corpus Analyze corpus Create learning/teaching materials Concordancing: outline of method

Encourage students to find a journal that is as close as possible to their narrow field of specialization. What are suitable texts?

It is desirable that students “absorb” lexical, syntactic, stylistic features “incidentally”. Using a single journal limits variability to some extent, making this more likely. Students probably know many specialist terms already. Creates an understandable context for new words. What are suitable texts?

taken care of in each student’s lab? already known or learnt through ER difficult to learn without formal study relatively manageable number of words effect is large relative to number of words

from Elsevier Science from Blackwell Publishers Directory of Open Access Journals 1. Finding suitable texts

Most offer free abstracts. Most allow purchase of full-text articles by credit card. Sometimes, a few sample full-text articles are offered at no charge. What’s available?

Large quantity of text required Abstracts are short Copying and pasting hundreds of abstracts can be very time-consuming Use text capture tool like StickyBrain or DEVONthink Capturing text

Lots of abstracts may be better than a few full-text articles: representative of a genre Probably best to get all abstracts from one journal: enables mastery of that journal style good preparation for 2nd semester writing course Important to motivate students Capturing text

Use concordancer Create list of words in texts Give frequencies of words Show contexts Analyze corpus

Use more generic science texts to generate handouts for the most important words in AWL. Do these together before asking students to make their own materials in their field of specialization... OR Make abstracts or papers in each student’s field the main focus of the course. Options

AWL Highlighter AWL Gapmaker Other tools

abstract from Atmopheric Environment, 34(17), from ScienceDirect

s/web_vp.html This program color-codes the words in a text in 4 categories: top 1000, 2nd 1000, AWL, other Web Vocab Profiler

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48 Teaching students to use a concordancer and related tools can enable them to use materials that match their interests, even if the content difficulty is far beyond their present level. These tools do this by allowing students to focus on specific features of texts. Hopefully, students will be able to make generalizations about particular genres and sub-genres, deepening their understanding by degrees.