Concordancing in
Japanese TEFL: Unlocking the power of data-driven learning
Gregory Hadley
As the TEFL community
continues in its paradigm shift away from an emphasis upon fluency (Willis and
Willis 1996), teachers world-wide over the past several years have become
increasingly interested in concordancing as a tool for language learning. Concordancing is a technique in which a
large body of text (called a corpus) is analysed by a computer program to
discover the regular patterns and lexical sets that are associated with a
specific word or phrase. By studying this data, teachers and students can make
certain generalisations as to how a certain lexical item is normally used.
Figure One shows a small sample concordance for the word interesting, which was
drawn from both spoken and written sources.
The data can be
manipulated, depending upon the complexity of the program, to display the
concordanced word (called the key word) in complete sentences, or to show
frequently-occurring words (called collocations) that occur only on the left or
the right of the key word. Concordancing is often used by teachers as a means
to provide hard data to either back up or refute their subjective judgements on
difficult questions of a grammatical nature. Students with access to
concordancing data normally use it for error analysis or as an aid to improve
their reading and writing skills.
Concordance of interesting
(Source: text of 17 million words in the Nagaoka Kosen Corpus)
1 o the locations of their sources. It is interesting to speculate what the
source
2 d produce a top quark. The rest, though interesting for a host of other
projects
3 silicates. Carbonates Are Key The most interesting
aspect of ALH84001 are the c
4 ty‑three
days." JUMPING FISH‑‑"The most interesting examples of amphibious fishe
5 the mechanisms of its action will prove interesting to deduce. Some studies
have
6 cally, but it would still be undeniably interesting and valuable to know how a
p
7 ids. NANCY COLLINS
(on camera) It`s interesting because there are so many
8 several of the
bidders. They had some interesting reasons
for why they were he
9 s great crime prevention, and it's very interesting. ROBERT KRULWICH (intervie
10 may be part of it. However, there is an interesting development in Hollywood, wh
11 on. "I've got it. You don't." With one interesting exception. If a guy is in a
12 DONALDSON By the way, here’s something interesting -- James Patterson says
13 born again. So it was a really, really interesting thing. You know in the Pente
14 OKS Well, I think that one of the other interesting objects in the sale that the
Figure 1
Most of the foreign
language learning which draws from corpora, often called Data-Driven Learning
or DDL, seems to be intended for upper intermediate or advanced learners. This
has been a major barrier to its use in Japan, where most learners rarely
progress beyond the low intermediate level (Helgeson 1993, Richards 1993). This
is not a problem specific only to Japan. Johns (1991a) remarked rather dryly
that language teachers all over the world have made the same point:
Talking about the DDL approach with other language teachers I am sometimes reproached that while this way of language‑teaching by stimulating student questions and by doing linguistic research in the classroom on a cooperative basis may be very well for students as intelligent, sophisticated, and well‑motivated as ours at Birmingham University, it would not work with students as unintelligent, unsophisticated and poorly‑motivated as theirs (p.12).
Could corpora work with
Japanese beginning or low intermediate learners of English? When I ask my colleagues in Japan, I am
often told that DDL is too hard for beginners, students will find it
uninteresting, or that it is unlikely students will learn anything practical
from such an approach. Finding an opportunity to see if these views are
actually valid had been difficult - until recently.
Teaching Environment
For the past year, I have
been using a data-driven approach with beginning-level learners at the Nagaoka
National College of Technology. This is a unique school where students complete
a specialized high school education and two years of college study in
engineering, applied science or industrial chemistry. My classes consisted mostly of high school sophomores. The
textbook was an English reader that was approved and “recommended” by the
Ministry of Education (Keirinkan 1996). It is a rather grim little book
consisting of short articles explaining mostly the cultural differences between
Japanese and people from other countries. However, the language of the book is
replete with artificial, contrived sentences aimed at teaching certain
grammatical points. My position was not an enviable one: Teaching a form-based
textbook to several classes of 40+ students, with only 50 minutes a week
allotted for each class. However, the burden was somewhat lightened by the fact
that all the classes were studying the text with a Japanese English teacher
another day during the week. In these classes, they students used a
Grammar-Translation method for studying the text. My approach was to respect
the pedagogic decisions of my colleagues, and try to find a methodology which
could in some manner complement what they were doing. Since data-driven
learning is, at its core, a methodology which focuses on the form of the
language, I felt that concordancing might be a helpful tool for my classes to
better deal with the grammatical and lexical items in the textbook.
Process
Much of my methodology
used for creating the classroom tasks came from Batstone’s (1995) concept of
Manipulation-Regulation-Abdication. From this nexus, I started out by
introducing the learners to a large amount of concordance material which has
been selected in advance by the teacher. The learners are called on to identify
any regularities in the data, and discuss it with the teacher or other
students. They then attempt to manipulate the material in a number of simple
writing tasks. Their progress was regulated by diagnostic tests throughout the
units. Finally, control of the material was abdicated to the students, and they
were allowed to apply it in open-ended writing tasks. The attempt is to move
from a product approach to teaching towards a process approach, with
data-driven learning as a pedagogic linking technique to bridge the gap. Dudley-Evans (1997) recently stated that
data-driven learning works best with teaching lexis and sentence-level writing
skills, and this is what we focused on in the class, since other classes in the
school deal with academic writing, conversation, listening and other skills.
A week before each class,
I would go through the textbook unit to find any regularity in the short
essays. When a certain lexical phrase or verb tense is used three or more times
in a paragraph, it is a fairly good indication this is something the Ministry
wanted students to learn. Using WordSmith Tools 2.0 (Scott 1997) and the 17
million word corpus compiled this year at the Nagaoka National College of
Technology, I created concordances which attempted to demonstrate how the items
in the textbook are used in authentic English Texts.
Before giving the students
copies of the concordances, however, they began each unit with a needs test
which helped them discover for themselves which grammatical items they may need
to focus on during the course. Afterwards, they were given the concordance
sheets, and a task which was a simplified version of those found in the COBUILD
grammar workbooks (cf. Goodale 1995). During the process of writing down
several authentic examples of the lexical or grammatical items which were the
focus of study, it was hoped that the students would become aware of certain
regularities in the text - a cognitive
process which is called consciousness-raising (Rutherford and Sharwood-Smith
1985). However, to make sure they are picking up these aspects of the language,
a reference sheet which explicitly shows some of the major clusters around the
lexical items was also given to the students. In the next class the students
would be given another test to see if they had modified their language output
as a result of the new data they had studied the week before. Later the
learners were allowed generalize their knowledge by putting away their data
sheets and writing their own sentences. Samples of all of this material can
been seen in Appendix One.
Results
So far I have noticed a
pleasant improvement in the writing skills and test scores of most of my
learners. Those who studied and regularly attended classes are writing
sentences and using the lexis from the text much more naturally than before. Of
course there are other regular mistakes which crop up in the learners’ writing,
but these are usually centered on things which were not covered in class. When
these arise, I simply can go back and provide more data from the corpora to
help them revise their work. One added
bonus has been that some learners, after being exposed to authentic data, have
started to see why the language used in the school reader is sometimes stilted
and unnatural.
I have found that the
students are generally interested in corpora-based language learning, partly
perhaps because as future scientists and engineers they tend to enjoy solving
problems and researching data. However, because the students are high
beginners, I must to limit the amount of data they receive so as not to
overload them. They also can become
bored very quickly if I do not give them a variety of activities in class. For
this reason, I will use the data in any number of activities, from as simple as
crossword puzzles or bingo games where they must listen for certain items, to
grammar-based activities which can be found in a number of teachers’ resource
books (cf. Rinvolucri 1992). In some ways my classes have changed only in that
the English being chosen and used has been taken from authentic material, not
that which has been artificially manipulated in one way or another for the sake
of the learner.
Problems with Data-Driven Learning
No method or technique is
perfect, and a number of problems with using DDL with beginners surfaced during
the course of the year. One which was mentioned earlier was the amount of data
the learners could be exposed to. Some students would become quickly
overwhelmed and demotivated if I provided them with too much data. Yet if not
enough data was provided, how could I know they had received sufficient
exposure to the grammatical or lexical items?
A more serious problem, however, was the difficulty of the concordance
material. While the focus of the concordances was at the level of the students,
the vocabulary and sentence structure which collocated with the key words was
often way beyond their level of ability. I was locked in a quandary: simplify
the concordance material and lessen its authenticity, or maintain the
authenticity and risk demotivating some students because of the difficulty of
the material. I opted to keep the material authentic, and some students did as
a result begin to throw up their hands in despair near the end of the course.
Others, however, rose to the challenge, and appeared to recognize the value of
working with real English as opposed to “textbook” English. It was a difficult
call for me, and I certainly would not criticize a teacher who chose to
simplify the material according to the students’ level of proficiency. Another
problem was the time it took for me to develop and copy materials for students.
While it was worth the effort in my estimation, it would have nice if each
student could access the corpus material
from the college’s computer network. This may become a possibility in
the next couple of years, but abdicating control of the teaching material too
soon might not be the best approach for younger students.
Conclusion
While it admittedly takes
a lot of time to develop the materials, I have found that a conscientious use
of corpora overall has been a valuable teaching resource for my classes. The
level of motivation of many of my students differed, but most seem to be
interested in working with authentic data over the material presented in the textbook.
Over time the discoveries students make from this form of study did seem to
result in an improvement in their writing skills. Future corpora-based projects
at this school includes the development of a lexically-based EAP course for the
college level students as a means of preparing them for upper undergraduate and
graduate studies. We will also be developing an advanced writing course for
professors at the college, which will help them hone their skills for writing
research papers. We have only started
to unlock the potential that DDL has for language learning in Japan. The next
few years promise to be both exciting and challenging.
References
Batstone R. 1995. Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Dudley-Evans T. 1997.
Plenary Address on Recent Developments in ESP. Delivered at the Japan
Conference of English for Specific Purposes, University of Aizu, Japan.
Goodale M. 199. Collins COBUILD Concordance Samplers 2:
Phrasal Verbs. London:
HarperCollins Publishers.
Helgeson M. 1993. Dismatling a Wall of Silence: The ‘English
Conversation’ Class’ in Wadden P.(Ed) A
Handbook for Teaching English in Japanese Colleges and Universities
pp.37-49. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johns T. 1991a. Should you be persuaded: Two examples of
data‑driven learning in Johns, T. and King P.(Eds.) Classroom Concordancing pp. 1‑13.
Birmingham: ELR.
Milestone 2 English Course. 1992. Tokyo:
Keirinkan.
Richards J. 1993. Real-World Listening in the Japanese
Classroom in Wadden P. (Ed) A
Handbook for Teachng English in Japanese Colleges and Universities pp.
50-62. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rinvolucri M. 1992. Grammar Games. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rutherford W. and
Sharwood-Smith M. 1985. Consciousness
Raising and Universal Grammar. Applied
Linguistics 6/3 pp.247-282.
Scott M. 1997. WordSmith Tools 2.0. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Willis J. and Willis D.
1996. Challenge and Change in Language
Teaching. Oxford: Heinemann.
Appendix
Reading Pretask
Instructions
With a group
of three or four people, look at the words below. These words will be in the story your are going to read. What is the subject of the story? Write the subject in the center of the mind
map below:
The subject of the story you will read is
_________________________________. With
the same group, write three questions that you want to ask about this subject.
1.
2.
3.
Now read the story.
Answer the questions. Write new
vocabulary in your "Putting it Together" worksheet.
Putting it
Together: Memory Maps
Checking
the Dictionary
Use this worksheet to write the definitions or meanings of the
vocabulary words in your native language.
Remember – sometimes a word in English can mean several words in your
language.
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English |
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Words in Context
Instructions: One word
has been taken out of each group. Put
the words back in the correct groups
1 organelles would simply
not contain the necessary ________ for metabolism and other life activities
2 rubber cements and are used for bonding
flexible ________ such as paper, textiles, and leather.Med
3 and for locating
deposits of natural construction ________ such as sand and gravel. Victor C.
Miller
4 g the colonial
era to move minerals and other raw ________ to seaports for export. Roads and railr
5 ssembly
operations, and shortages of imported raw ________ and spare parts have forced
factories to
6 Alluvial gold was
the first of the important raw ________ that the states monopolized in order to
7 dge over the
others by controlling sources of raw ________ overseas--in East and South Asia
and in
8
terra-cotta, mud, beadwork, ivory, and other ________. In
southern and eastern Africa are found
9 duced chemical fertilizers,
pesticides, and other ________ that greatly increase farm yields (altho
1 s the region's eastern border. The average annual
________ is 13 deg C (55 deg F), and the rainfa
2 olute zeroAbsolute zero is the lowest theoretical
________, representing the complete absence of
3 presenting the complete absence of heat. At this ________ matter would possess zero
ENTROPY
4 .Absolute zero is the lowest point of an absolute
________ scale. Such a scale can be
establishe
5 e of a trapped volume of gas as a function of its
________ in ordinary Celsius or Fahrenheit degr
6 isplay a linear relationship between pressure and
________ under conditions not far from ambient;
7 ressure becomes zero defines the absolute zero of
________. The extrapolation is
necessary becau
8 etermined is -273.15 deg C (-459.67 deg F). This ________ is the zero point of the
absolute Kelv
9 the zero point of the absolute Kelvin and Rankine
________ scales. One Celsius degree and
one
1 izontal-vertical position, Mondrian exerted great
________ both on architecture and on painting, fr
2 Beginning in the 19th century, mainly through the
________ of KIERKEGAARD, religion was
3 cculturation
In anthropology, acculturation is the ________ of one society or ethnic
group on anothe
4 s that occur in a nonindustrial society under the
________ of a complex Western society. An example
5 omplex Western society. An example of this is the
________ of American culture on the native tribes
6 many
groups. In the United States, the
profound ________ of Viola Spolin, who created a systemati
7 During the 1950s the Actors Studio had a profound
________ on American theater, training for the st
8 (42 deg F).
The interior highlands are under the ________ of a continental climate
and have severe
9 -the Sun, the Moon, and the stars--had a profound
________ on the activities of humans.
Thus, for
1 established the Carl Zeiss Foundation for scientific
________ and social improvement; in 1896 he
2 epartment's chief explosives advisor. In 1889 his
________ into the properties of GUNCOTTON led
3 ug to be tested and made available for continuing
________ into its uses against diseases such as ca
4 Reagan
administration banned federal funding of ________ using fetal tissue obtained
from induced
5 academic levels, to teach, publish, and engage in
________ unhindered by others. Those
protected
6 edom, in turn, have the responsibility to conduct
________ honestly, to report their findings accura
7 ic series Memoires, offered prizes for scientific
________, and supported several important scientif
8 795. It served as an active center for scientific
________ and debate until the 1830s. Today it cont
9 planned to have a single center for teaching and
________ that would bring together experts in al
1 ables the spectroscopist to readily determine the
________ of the absorbing material. The absorption
2 opy, and high-speed centrifugation to analyze the ________
of ion pumps. Radioactive tracers have b
3 red to sustain their own productivity. Where the ________ of these systems is
disturbed through hu
4 om covalently bonded to the carbonyl carbon. The ________ of aldehydes is often written
as RCHO.
5 A microphotograph reveals the ________ of
Hydrodictyon, a species of algae.
6 substance.
With the determination in 1988 of the ________ of the IgE receptors on
mast cells, rese
7 uce L. La RoseBibliography: Collet, Leon W., The ________ of the Alps
(1974); Engel, Claire E., T
8 and the
threat of impending divine judgment. The ________ of the book falls into nine
parts, each
9 the world depended on their sharing a common
________, the ________ of logic. Thus
what Russ
1 rganizations, both private and governmental. The ________ tables, divided into several
categories,
2 SSC. First
ground for the project was broken the ________ year, despite continuing
political objec
3 in an annual
report. The statements include the
________: The balance sheet compares
the firms's a
4 onitrile to be a potential carcinogen, and in the
________ year the U.S. government set
standards
5 ut the production of art centers primarily on the
________ questions: What is the role of
genius,
6 he ancient civilizations of North Africa, see the
________ articles: AFRICAN PREHISTORY;
7 ter elections in 1979, but lost the office in the
________ year's voting under a new constitution,
8 ping out of a bottle. But clicks function as the ________ consonants do in the Roman
alphabet: p,
9 es for a modifier meaning "that" are shown
in the ________ examples: mtu yule
("that person"), wat
1 distortion,
in which imaged lines bend ________ inward (pincushion effect) or outward (barr
2 Fluid
injected into the cavity may be ________ a saline solution or hormones called
PROSTA
3 ed of a speed in a given direction, any change in
________ speed or direction represents an accelerati
4 ssolved in water they are separated (dissociated)
________ partially or completely into charged partic
5 forces results in CAPILLARITY, in which a liquid
________ rises or falls in a fine tube.
6 in--have been replaced or modified by synthetics,
________ used alone or added to natural adhesives.
7 flexible, and more procedurally expeditious than ________
Congress or the courts could provide.
8 career is finally chosen. Adolescent girls who
________ marry early or make no career plans beyond
9 ater self-confidence than those whose parents are
________ overly permissive or authoritarian.
1 (1985 est.
pop., 500,566) is the major port and ________ center of northeastern
Scotland. Locat
2 ducers; mahogany, ebony, and okoume are the major
________ woods. Ocean ________ fishing
3 hy and how Western influence would benefit
Africa. ________ interests were also
important,
4 Later it
functioned primarily as the center of ________ life in the city; markets were
held her
5 cient and backward.
Coffee is the most important ________ crop. (Image Bank)Coffee, Brazil's
6 Complete
Airbrush Techniques for ________, Technical, and Industrial Applications
7 k, on the Lim Fjord. It is an important port and ________ center. The population is 113,650 (198
8 dy growth followed, and the city was a prosperous
________ center by the 17th century.
The
9 as the Egyptian Riviera. The West Harbor is the ________ center and has numerous
warehouses
1 f a
vapor. Aerosols in which the particles
are ________ the same size (monodisperse) are often prep
2 children,
secondary schools were functioning in ________ all provincial towns, and the
national univ
3 border points, and a network of airports connects
________ all of the provinces. Substantial natural-g
4 til the 19th century. By the early 20th century ________ all of Africa had been
subjected to Europea
5 has the highest fertility rates in the world, and
________ half its population are under 15 years of a
6 many of which are beyond its ability to
control. ________ three-fourths of all
African nations are de
7 The
descendants of the first group now inhabit ________ all of Africa south of an
imaginary line ac
8 corn and wheat adaptable to subtropical
regions. ________ 50% of the world's
wheat land was sown
9 atmosphere. Although the principal gases are
________ transparent to radiation, the tiny amounts
1 often using only a few micrograms because of the
________' scarcity and intense radioactivity.
2 M--are included in the class.Although none of the
________ are found in nature in their pure metalli
3 al. Dreiser felt that the story contained all the
________ of American national life: "Politics, soc
4 o describe the balanced reciprocal changes of the
________: they perish into the things
from which
5 Annunziata, Florence). In his later works the
________ of movement and vigorous action are incre
6 use of Christ's words of Institution, and of the
________ ordained by Him"; (4)
"The Historic Epis
7 is a compound produced by removing water or the
________ of water from an acid or a base. Acid
8 ach interspersed with lines characteristic of the
________ present, a powerful new tool was given to
9 and they are also the means by which all of the
________ in the universe other than hydrogen have
These are the words to choose from:
elements
materials nearly temperature
either influence commercial
structure following commercial research
Understanding a Word
What does it mean to "understand a
word"? This is not an easy
question to answer. In this course, to
understand vocabulary, we will look at things such as word families, clusters
(chunks) and sentences.
Word Families
To "understand" a word, you need to know
what "family" the word belongs to.
Below are the most common words that you will find somewhere near the
word gasoline.