Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
ISSUE NO. 4
THE WORKSHOP
LTC INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE / SEPTEMBER 2009 / VOLUME 1
Notes: Re smitten: This comes from an old word meaning ‘strike’. So, smitten and love
struck mean about the same thing. Re cast a spell, note also the collocations cast a net
(over) & cast a shadow (over). That is, a spell seems at least partly equated with a net and/
or a shadow.
DISABILITY,
SUDDEN,
HELPLESSNESS, HUNGER,
FIGURATIVE PHRASE HARD HEAT MADNESS MAGIC
LOSS OF THIRST
CONTACT
CONTROL
Recent technological developments in the management of financially sensitive information have demonstrated
the importance of finding ways of controlling the means of access to such information.
Knowledge of data management is essential for graduates of any discipline who hope to work in those
areas of the economy which currently have the greatest chance of growth during the first half of the
next decade.
Does one word jump off the page? The examples contain 65 words, the most frequent of which are ‘of (9)
and ‘the(6). There it is, staring us in the face, the most common word in the examples - the second most
common in the whole language, hardly mentioned in traditional ELT grammar teaching: ‘of’ is the key to
the construction of noun phrases in English.
Sinclair gave a clear explanation of the function and importance of ‘of’ in Corpus, Concordance,
Collocation:
The simple structure of nominal groups is based on a headword which is a noun. Determiners,
numerals, adjectives etc. come in front of the noun and modify its meaning in various ways.
Prepositional phrases and relative clauses come after the noun and add further strands of
meaning.
The function of ‘of’ is to introduce a second noun as a potential headword:
Although the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English rightly points out that noun phrases are
made in ways, and that such noun phrases can be very long, it also endorses the view that different
kinds of phrases containing ‘of’ are one of the largest sub-categories of noun phrases. Here are a few of
the dozens or so types of phrase they list:
It is worth noting that this language is precisely the kind of language referred to earlier which is likely to be invisible
to learners, whose attention is much more likely to be focussed on difficult content words. If they are to write well,
they need to add both kinds of lexical item to their mental lexicons. This will probably not happen without proactive
intervention by the teacher.
• Encourage students to think bigger than the word - always look for the two- or three-word expression
• When teaching a new word, teach some of its most common collocations - for example, heavy smoker, non-
smoker, chain smoker. Obviously, the complexity and selection of the collocations will depend on the
students’ level and interests.
• Extend ‘half learnt’ words - pass / sit/ revise for an exam etc....................................
• Help them to notice collocations - having used a text with a class, ask the students to look back at the text
and find / circle the collocations. You’ll have to decide which are the most useful, interesting ones to focus
on. ‘There is no acquisition without noticing’
• Encourage students to invest in a collocation dictionary - a real help for students at all levels, especially
IELTS, FCE and CAE
• Use collocations to show and explain differences - bare vs. naked; wide vs. broad etc. As well as to highlight
usage - carry out repairs, tests, surveys etc........................
• Asking students: ‘Are there any words you don’t understand?’ is not a helpful question. They may indeed
understand all the words but fail to notice the combinations those words are in. Try this:
T! Is there anything in the first paragraph you think you should write in your notebooks? (silence while
students scan the paragraph) Nothing?
SS! No
T Are you sure? I don’t believe you. (more silence and looking) What about the expression with ‘risk’? In all my
time as a teacher I’ve never heard a student say or write ‘run the risk of’. Perhaps my students have never
noticed it. Do you use this expression? (general shaking of heads) Perhaps you have never noticed it either. OK,
write it in your notebooks, then.
• Pay attention to texts / materials which include chunks that exhibit some degree of fixedness, and some
degree of non-literalness - run a business; catch a bus; heavy rain; I see what you mean; a heavy-handed
approach to the problem; Well, I mustn’t keep you.
• Try doing more ‘narrow’ reading. Narrow reading is where the students read a lot of texts on the same
topic. Coursebooks tend to move from one topic to the next, and such presents little opportunity for
vocabulary to be recycled.
From word to phrase to sentence: a new approach
to teaching grammar (Part 1)
Discover why we should focus on teaching the most frequent words in English in this article by Scott Thornbury,
author of Natural Grammar.
The little words
I was on my way back from work one day when I came to a place I had never been before. It was not really a house –
more like a place for people who have no home.
An old man came out and said: "Come in". I went in. There were some people and a few children there. They looked at
me. "Why have you been so long?" one of them said. I didn't know what to say so I left. One of the children came after
me. "Stop", she said, "you should first give each of us three things." "What kind of things?" I said. "You still don't see,
do you?" she said. "We are very old, and we have been here many years now. We are not children at all. We are the
little people..."
(to be continued)
Not a great story, I admit, but did you find it easy to understand? You should have. Every word in that story is in the
top 200 most frequent words in English. Many of the words – like the, you, of, I, and – are in the top 20. Notice that a
lot of these words are what are called function words – that is, they have no real dictionary meaning but instead they
have a grammatical function. Typical function words are of, do, been, a, and so. Most of the top 200 words in English
are in fact function words. But there are also a number of content words – that is, words that carry lexical
information, such as the very common nouns day, place, people, way, and the high-frequency verbs said, went, know,
see, and stop.
The reason these words are frequent is not accidental. For a start, the high-frequency words express extremely
common meanings, such as existence (be, was), possibility (would, may, perhaps), movement (go, came, stop),
quantity (many, few, some), time (then, now, day, years), location (house, place, in, at, there) and identity (you, they,
people, us).
Also, these common words combine with other words to form high-frequency 'chunks'. Many of the most common
idioms in English are formed around at least one high-frequency word. Here are some of the most common idiomatic
chunks in spoken English, according to a recent study. (Words that are in the top 200 most frequent words are
underlined): kind of, sort of, of course, in terms of, in fact, deal with, at all, as well, make sure, go through, first of all.
The capacity to draw on a memorized 'bank' of such chunks is an important factor in achieving spoken fluency. High-
frequency words express high-frequency meanings, and they form the core of high-frequency chunks. They also
provide coverage of a lot of text: more than 50% of all the words in any given text will be in the top 200 words of the
language.
The educational thinker Caleb Gattegno believed that these high-frequency words were so important that they were
worth giving special emphasis as soon as possible. The basis for his 'Silent Way' was the manipulation of just these
most frequent words. He believed that they would provide the learner with the feel for the language, without which
their future learning would be difficult. The problem with these words is that, both as learners and teachers, we tend
to overlook them. We focus on the meaningful words in a text, but don't pay attention to 'the little words'. Like the
little people, we take them for granted. Here are some ways of paying them a bit more respect:
1. With any text you're using in class, ask learners to underline all the function words. If the text is a short
one, say 250 words maximum, they can search the whole text. Otherwise, choose a paragraph of 100 words
or so. Ask them then to count the proportion of function words to other words. They'll find that at least a
third of the words in the text are function words. This exercise will help in the identification of function
words, and also in raising awareness as to their importance.
2. Choose a particular high-frequency word to focus on each lesson. For example, of. Ask learners to identify all
the examples of of in a text. They should write these out along with their immediate contexts. It helps if they
organize their examples with the 'key word' aligned in the centre. For example, there were four examples of
of in the story at the beginning of this article:
one of them
One of the children
each of us
What kind of things
In this way they can start to see patterns and regularities. For example, the pattern pre-determiner + of + object
pronoun is very common, as in one of them, each of us, both of you, etc. As they collect more examples from more texts, more
patterns will become obvious. They can check these against a good learners' dictionary, such as the Oxford Advanced
Learner's Dictionary.
3. Challenge the learners to write a story or a poem using the most common words in English, along the lines
of The Little People. You can find a list of a hundred common words in my book Natural Grammar. Again,
this helps raise awareness as to their wide variety of meanings and combinations.
From word to phrase to sentence: a new approach
to teaching grammar (Part 2)
Discover why we should focus on teaching the most frequent words in English in the second of two articles by Scott
Thornbury, author of Natural Grammar.
The big words
In the previous article I made a case for teaching the top 200 high-frequency words in English as soon as possible.
And as thoroughly as possible. That means teaching them in their typical syntactic environments and with their
common collocations. By learning these high-frequency function words, I argued, learners will be getting their
grammar 'for free'. But knowing that a common word, like want, for example, takes the pattern want + NP (noun
phrase) is not much use if you have no noun phrases to put into the NP slot. You may urgently want a corkscrew,
but if you don't know the word for corkscrew, you will be reduced to, well, miming one. A fat lot of good your 200
high-frequency words will be if you are speaking on the phone!
So, along with the common little words, learners need a bank of 'big words', that is, words that do the informational
work in speaking and writing. This is of course something we have known all along: learners need vocabulary. And
as much as possible.
But what vocabulary? Short of knowing what learners' needs are (for example, aspirins), frequency may still be a
useful guide. After all, the high-frequency words are highly frequent because they are used a lot. (Duh!) The top
3,000 words in English comprise something like 85% of all text. Put another way, these 3,000 words encode
meanings which cover over four-fifths of what we need to say and write. In the absence of any other guidance, these
might be the words to learn.
But there are problems. Does 3,000 words mean 3,000 words, or 3,000 word families? (A word family is a base
word and its derivatives. So, the word family for frequency, for example, would include frequent, infrequent and
frequently). And does 3,000 words mean 3,000 meanings? Clearly not, since many words in English have more
than one meaning. Think of mean, for a start: don't be mean; the mean temperature; did you mean to?; he plays a
mean game of dominoes...etc. Nevertheless, the 3,000 most frequent words in their most frequent forms, and only
their most common meanings, might be a realistic target for most learners. In fact, at ten words a night, with
breaks on Sundays, you could learn them all in a year! Where can you find a list of these words? For some bizarre
reason, such a list does not exist. The nearest thing to a published frequency list is the list of what are called
'defining words'. These are the words that the dictionary writers used in compiling their definitions. In the Oxford
Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) you'll find them at the back: there are just under 3,000 of them. As an
example of how much mileage you can get out of relatively few words, here is a Polish student describing a
shopping experience(1). The words that do not occur in the OALD defining vocabulary are underlined.
A: It happened I think two years ago, I went to a shop. It was Saturday, I usually do my shopping on Saturday. So I
went to a shop to buy shoes, and I went to that particular shop in which I found my pair of shoes.
B: Expensive?
A: Yeah, quite expensive.
B: How much?
A: About forty to fifty pounds, something like that. So I went there, it was full of people and I tried on the shoes that
I liked, so I decided to buy them. So I bought them. I went home after that, but it was almost the end of the day, the
shopping day, so it wasn't left a long time for the shops to close, so when I went home and decided to try on the
shoes again, I saw that in the bag were two left shoes. So I had, well, it was quite an expensive pair of shoes, so I
tried to go back to the shop and exchange them so although I knew that they will exchange them, I was a bit
worried. But I was late and the shop was closed already and I had to go the next day on Sunday to get the proper
pair of shoes.
B: Did you manage to get it?
A: Yes, finally.
Apart from four words, the learner has told her story using only words in the defining vocabulary. In fact, 92% of
the total words she uses are in the top one thousand words in spoken English. Thus, the student (who was in an
advanced class) manages to be communicatively effective using only a limited range of words. So, learners need the
200 high frequency little words, in order to express a full range of grammatical meaning, and they need another
2,000 or so big words, in order to become communicatively effective. Language learning, in other words, is
essentially lexical.
1 The data comes from the research done by Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman as preparation for Natural English
and is reprinted with their permission.
An extract from Scott Thornbury’s ‘Natural Grammar’
This extract was taken from ‘Natural Grammar’ by Scott Thornbury 2004, and published by Oxford University
Press. Available from all good ELT publishers.
Ideas Ideas Ideas
the corpus. Next, I draw a huge typically come up, along with other
Collocation Grids
These can be done with many groups of words with similar or related meanings, and for different kinds of
grammatical pairs such as subjects and verbs, verbs and objects, adjectives and nouns, etc.
Procedure: Prepare a hand-out, OHP or draw on the whiteboard a collocation grid like that below. Students work
individually or in pairs to complete the table, marking each possible collocation with a +. If student, or teacher, is
unsure mark it with a ? - their homework could be to check this in a (collocation) dictionary or using Google.
old
antique
ancient
new
recent
current
modern
old + + +
antique +
ancient ? + ?
new + + +
recent + + + +
current + +
modern ? + + + +
4-3-2 minute talks
Many of us remember writing essays at school, only for them to be returned ‘marked’ and for them then to be filed,
possibly even discarded, while we moved on to a new essay, when the write-mark-file pattern was repeated.
Similarly, many students are asked to make short oral presentations to their classmates; the teacher may provide
correction, better ways of saying something, and then the class moves on to a new topic and a new talk.
Research evidence shows that both of these procedures represent missed opportunities; a change of classroom
procedure - giving feedback then asking learners to repeat the same talk - can produce real improvements in the
lexical - in particular collocational - quality of learners’ production, in either writing or speech.
In the case of spoken language, the following procedure can be extremely helpful in developing learners’ fluency:
1. Learners work in groups; one student in each group gives a short talk for four minutes to one of the others in the
group.
2. The same student then gives the same talk to a different student in the group, this time restricted to three
minutes.
3. Again with a new partner, the student gives the same talk a third time, this time restricted to two minutes.
Changing partners is important because the speaker is less inclined to add new information than they would be if
talking to the same ‘audience’ again. Reducing the time limit has a similar effect, encouraging the speaker to focus
on better, more fluent, versions of the same content.
Essay Preparation
Choose a topic for a discursive essay, for example:
Ask learners to write down four or five nouns you think they will need to write about the topic, for example:
Have learners look up the nouns in their (collocation) dictionaries and choose adjectives and verbs which they
need to express their ideas. Emphasise that they must not worry if there are some words they do not know.
Encourage them to look quickly through the dictionary entry and notice the words they do recognise. Help them to
choose useful phrases which will help them to write a good essay:
Rapid Sorting
Give learners two nouns from a collocation dictionary, which they write on a piece of paper. Read out a selection of
about 10/12 collocates from the entries. Students write the collocates in one or both lists as appropriate.
Try to choose relatively new, half-known words. If you choose words of similar meaning, you must be prepared to
discuss possibilities and sort out possible confusion. Remember that collocation is about probabilities, not black
and white choices. Here is an example:
ANSWER - expect, supply, insist on, have, appropriate, complete, detailed, final
REPLY - expect, send, insist on, appropriate, audible, detailed, pointed
If you want to wake up a sleepy class, you can turn this activity into real activity by having learners point to the
left hand wall if the verb collocates with ‘answer’, the right hand wall if it collocates with ‘reply’, and both walls if
the verb collocates with both nouns.
As easy as possible
Learners work in small teams, two teams competing against another. Give each team a list of say, 10 nouns which are
headwords in a collocation dictionary. Choose these carefully, taking into account the class level, words met recently
etc. Each group has about 10 minutes to prepare, using the dictionary. They list 5 collocates from the dictionary for
each noun. Team A then say these words one at a time for each headword to Team B who have to write the words
down and try to guess the noun. The interest lies in the fact that collocates should be chosen so that Team B’s task is
as easy as possible.
If they guess a noun from one collocate, Team A scores 5 points, if they need two collocates, 4 points and so on. If
they do not work out the headword when they have all 5 collocates, Team A scores 0 for that word.
Notice the game is constructed so that the team which uses the strongest and/or most frequent collocates is likely to
win, so there is a systematic element built into the game. Here are some words which you can use to demonstrate
how to choose words:
Stand Up!
Choose a noun with a lot of verb or adjective collocates. Tell the learners that all the words you read out collocate
with the same noun, which they must try to guess. Learners write down the collocates you read out. When they
think they know the noun, they stand up. Continue till everyone is standing. Check guesses. Repeat with a new
word.
This activity only works properly if you choose the order of the words carefully, moving from more general words
to stronger collocates.
Example:
You can do the same thing with adverbs and adjectives or verbs:
3. upstairs, in luxury, alone, beyond your means, to a ripe old age live
3. When you decide what to study, you must make a planned choice.
11.If you want to be really fit, you need to make more exercise.
12.If you don’t keep to your diet, you won’t have the result you want.
This type of exercise is particularly useful as feedback after learners have done a piece of written work, using their
mistakes and not some common / invented errors from a little man in Cambridge.
Note: if you don’t have access to a collocation dictionary, get the students to see if they can spot their ‘performance’
errors first and then check them against a corpus/concordance sampler for the words in bold.
Short Paragraphs
1. Look up news in a collocation dictionary. Then try to complete this short text:
A hundred years ago news was slow to ................. in. Today as soon as news .................., it is flashed across the world
by satellite. It is almost impossible for governments to ................ news. No matter what they do to stop it ............., it
will always ................... out.
To prepare students to write an essay, first ask them to write a paragraph similar to those above using five or six
collocations of an important noun they will need for the essay.
Very useful words for very
With many adjectives you want to use ‘very’, but there are lots of other words with a similar meaning which are
stronger or more precise. For example:
When you put an adjective in your notebook, try to record a word with it which means ‘very’.
Often you can also find a word which means ‘a bit’, for example, slightly inaccurate, somewhat sceptical.
mitigating
rain
grateful
closely
age
fatally
Alternatively, students can try and predict the colocations first, and then read or listen to check their answers.
Lexical Dominoes
A good activity for reviewing and recycling collocations and / or fixed expressions.
Before the lesson, select 15-20 collocations or phrases that have come up in recent lessons, and write them in a
grid as shown. The beginning of the collocation or phrase is written on the right of one domino, the end’s written on
the right of the next d lay domino. Copy the grid and cut it into horizontal strips to make one set of dominoes for
each group of students.
Hand out the sets of dominoes to small groups. Students play the game: they try to lay out the dominoes end to end
on the table.
of the (Finish)
market
Collocation Pelmanism
It is often necessary to recycle new words several times in class before they become part of
learners' active vocabulary, and the same is true of collocations. Whether the collocations are
introduced through a text, as described in the article, or explicitly taught, the memory game
pelmanism can provide a useful review activity in a later lesson.
Advanced level learners may be aware of the meanings of many phrasal verbs, but are not
always able to use them appropriately. This is partly because phrasal verbs often have very
specific connotations and much narrower collocational fields than the 'synonyms' we use to
help learners understand their meaning. For example, if we tell learners that 'turn up' means
'arrive', this can lead to inappropriate utterances like 'What time did you turn up?',
implying criticism where this may not be the intention. For this reason it's a good idea to
introduce phrasal verbs in context, e.g. through a text, with their common collocates. This set
of cards gives an example of how to revise such collocations in a subsequent lesson.
Procedure
• Give students, in groups of 3-4, a set of cut-up cards, and instruct them to place all the
cards face-down and spread them out on the table.
• The first student turns over two cards. If the two cards form a strong collocation, he
keeps the pair and has another go.
• If the cards do not collocate, he turns them over again, leaving them in the same
position on the table, and the next student has a turn.
• The winner is the person who has most pairs at the end.
• In order to collect pairs, learners need to remember the position of the cards as well as
the collocations, so it's important that they do not move the cards around too much.
It's also a good idea to demonstrate the game with a strong student the first time you
use it in class. If you later use the same activity again, you'll probably find that
learners remember what to do.
Bingo
BINGO
Everyone loves Bingo! Use Bingo to recycle and consolidate recently met collocations.
Draw a typical 3 x 3 grid on the board.
Divide the class in two - Team A / B
Give the students the headword.
Teams take it in turns to call out a word or lexical chunk that collocates with the headword. For example, re-sit,
pass etc. for the headword ‘exam’.
You can make it more challenging by excluding some words that are too easy.
Please note: choose the words carefully - don’t give a headword for a word that the students only know one or two
collocations for.
Note: activities like this tend to work better if you read the beginning, and they find the ending, rather than the
other way round. Secondly, be careful when choosing the collocations that there is only one acceptable answer.
Competitive students like to win, and if two students get the answer at the same time, a lot of discussion and time-
wasting will ensue.
Fixed Phrases
Level: Advanced
Aims: To draw students’ attention to the frequent use of ‘prefabs’ in English; to encourage use of prefabs
Preparation:
1. Collect a range of examples of ‘prefabs’ or ‘polywords’. These are usually short phrases which are not
constructed word by word but which are learnt and used as single chunks. (See Worksheet below for a small
sample.) Make enough copies of the worksheet for one per student.
Worksheet 1
Polywords or prefabs
for that matter all in all by and large once and for all
more or less over the top at the end of the day at this moment in time
2. Find a text which contains a number of examples of polywords. Here is a sample text but you should try and find
your own. make enough copies for one per student.
I keep trying to remember when it all started, and how it all started. There wasn’t one particular
thing I remember but just a lot of small things. Kids pick up a lot of vibes from the atmosphere and
from what goes on around them. Sometimes it’s just a vague feeling of unease, a feeling that
something is not quite right, that things have changed in a way you can’t describe but it is a feeling
that is real. And that’s how it was for me, I think. It was like a virus - something sick in the air,
invisible but definitely there. It’s only now, when I think back on everything, that I can see the
pattern. At the time, it was no more than a vague feeling in the pit of my stomach, a feeling of threat,
of insecurity that gradually replaced the feelings of innocent happiness.
1. Introduce the idea of polywords to the class. Essentially, these are more or less fixed phrases which are stored as
wholes in memory. Give just one or two phrases, such as ‘more or less’, or ‘such as’. Then elicit more from the
class.
2. Distribute Worksheet 1. Students work in pairs to create sentences using these items. Allow 15 minutes for this.
Then check the sentences.
3. Allow another 10 minutes for them to come up with other polywords in English. Check these together.
4. Distribute the text you have chosen (see the sample text above). Ask them to underline any phrases they think
are polywords.
Follow-up
1. For the next class, ask each student to bring in a text from a newspaper, a magazine, or a novel, in which they
have underlined polywords. They will work in threes, exchanging their texts and discussing the polywords they
have identified.
2. In a later class, encourage students to separate such polywords into two classes: those that cannot be changed at
all, and those which are more open-ended. For, example, ‘as a matter of fact’ is not normally changeable. We
cannot say, ‘as a matter of fiction’ or ‘as an item of fact’. But ‘how it was for me’ could be changed into ‘how it was
for you, ...for them, ... for us’. And some fixed phrases leave even more space for substitution. For example, ‘the (-
er), the (-er)’ can become ‘The bigger the better’ or ‘The more I see her, the less I like her’, etc. Thus these
polywords are no more than fixed frameworks with potential gaps to be filled.
This activity has been borrowed from: ‘Advanced Learners’ by Alan Maley, OUP 2009
Double Trouble
Level: Upper Intermediate + (but see Comments below)
Time: 60 minutes, plus follow-up
Aims: To raise students’ awareness of common doublets in English
Preparation:
Make enough copies of the worksheet below for one per student. Also make sure that there are plenty of copies of
reliable learner’s dictionaries available.
Procedure:
1. Introduce the topic of double phrases in English by eliciting examples drawn from everyday life : ‘bed and
breakfast’, ‘salt and pepper’, ‘fish and chips’. You might mention that many pub signs in England also take this
form: The Dog and Duck, The Fox and Hounds, The Crown and Anchor, The George and Dragon, The Horse and
Groom, etc. There seems to be a great attraction in English towards this kind of structure. Here are a few more
quirky or unusual ones: The Moon and Mushroom, The Eagle and Child, The Lamb and Flag, The Bull and Bush, The
Boot and Slipper. Students may like to speculate about the origin of these names! If you need a few more examples,
think films and music - The Fast and The Furious etc.
2. Distribute Worksheet 1 (on next page). Students work in pairs to check these phrases in their dictionaries. Allow
15 minutes for this. Then discuss how many of them are not listed. Can they think of any more such phrases they
have met in their reading or heard?
3. Again in pairs, students try to find words which commonly collocate with these doublets. For example, ....born and
bred in London, profit and loss account, a lean and hungry look, ... I need to see it in black and white.
4. If there is time, discuss the literary devices these phrases often exploit. These include rhyming (wheeling and
dealing, hard and fast); alliteration (bright and breezy); or repetition of the same meaning (over and above);
opposites (give and take).
Follow up
1 Students conduct a homework project. Allow two weeks for them to collect as many more examples of doublets as
they can. These can be derived from dictionary searches, Internet searches, or wide-ranging reading. They compile a
complete list to bring to class.
2 Extend the project to look for examples of two-word combinations such as:
chitchat, ping-pong, tip-top, sing-song, knick-knack, shilly-shally, zigzag, see-saw, tick tock, willy-nilly, fiddle-faddle,
mishmash, bigwig, ding-dong, teeny-weeny, powwow, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, argy-bargy, tittle-tattle, goody-
goody, hoity-toity, flip-flop, hanky-panky, hocus-pocus, hobnob.
3 Again note and discuss how often two-word combinations exploit rhyme and alliteration.
Comments
The main point of these activities is to raise students’ awareness of this phenomenon so that they will be on the
look out when reading or listening to English. It is not intended that they should learn long lists of such items.
the great and the good spick and span straight and narrow
This idea has been kindly reproduced with no permission whatsoever from ‘Advanced Learners’ by Alan
Maley, OUP 2009.
For more activities on rhyme and alliteration in English see Teaching Chunks of Language by Seth
Lindstromberg and Frank Boers, Helbling 2008, especially 3.16 ‘Noticing Patterns of Sound Repetition’.
Corpus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts (now usually
electronically stored and processed). They are used to do statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, checking
occurrences or validating linguistic rules on a specific universe.
A corpus may contain texts in a single language (monolingual corpus) or text data in multiple languages
(multilingual corpus). Multilingual corpora that have been specially formatted for side-by-side comparison are
called aligned parallel corpora.
In order to make the corpora more useful for doing linguistic research, they are often subjected to a process known
as annotation. An example of annotating a corpus is part-of-speech tagging, or POS-tagging, in which information
about each word's part of speech (verb, noun, adjective, etc.) is added to the corpus in the form of tags. Another
example is indicating the lemma (base) form of each word. When the language of the corpus is not a working
language of the researchers who use it, interlinear glossing is used to make the annotation bilingual.
Some corpora have further structured levels of analysis applied. In particular, a number of smaller corpora may be
fully parsed. Such corpora are usually called Treebanks or Parsed Corpora. The difficulty of ensuring that the
entire corpus is completely and consistently annotated means that these corpora are usually smaller, containing
around 1 to 3 million words. Other levels of linguistic structured analysis are possible, including annotations for
morphology, semantics and pragmatics.
Corpora are the main knowledge base in corpus linguistics. The analysis and processing of various types of
corpora are also the subject of much work in computational linguistics, speech recognition and machine
translation, where they are often used to create hidden Markov models for part of speech tagging and other
purposes. Corpora and frequency lists derived from them are useful for language teaching.
Concordance
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate
contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer
era, only works of special importance, such as the Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, had concordances
prepared for them.
Even with the use of computers, producing a concordance (whether on paper or in a computer) may require much
manual work, because they often include additional material, including commentary on, or definitions of, the
indexed words, and topical cross-indexing that is not yet possible with computer-generated and computerized
concordances.
However, when the text of a work is on a computer, a search function can carry out the basic task of a
concordance, and is in some respects even more versatile than one on paper.
A bilingual concordance is a concordance based on aligned parallel text.
A topical concordance is a list of subjects that a book (usually The Bible) covers, with the immediate context of
the coverage of those subjects. Unlike a traditional concordance, the indexed word does not have to appear in the
verse. The most well known topical concordance is Nave's Topical Bible.
The first concordance, to the Vulgate Bible, was compiled by Hugh of St Cher (d.1262), who employed 500 monks
to assist him. In 1448 Rabbi Mordecai Nathan completed a concordance to the Hebrew Bible. It took him ten
years. 1599 saw a concordance to the Greek New Testament published by Henry Stephens and the Septuagint
was done a couple of years later by Conrad Kircher in 1602. The first concordance to the English bible was
published in 1550 by Mr Marbeck, according to Cruden it did not employ the verse numbers devised by Robert
Stephens in 1545 but "the pretty large concordance" of Mr Cotton did. Then followed the notorious Cruden's
Concordance and Strong's Concordance.
Which word are we after?
Level: Elementary to advanced
Time: 20 minutes
Aims: To show how corpora and concordance software can help teachers (and students) to prepare classroom
materials
Materials: Worksheets for each student
Preparation:
1. Choose a word that you would like the class to look at in detail
2. Go to one of the sites on the Internet that allow limited free access to a text database, such as Copllins Cobuild at
http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk (up to 40 hits returned) and the British National Corpus at http://
sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html (up to 50 hits, and rather more context). Type in your headword(s) and choose
10-15 examples that will be suitable for your students interests and level.
3. Copy and paste the examples into a word processor and delete the chosen word/phrase from each example, leaving
a gap, as in the example below.
4. Print and make enough copies for each pair / small group.
Procedure
1. Divide the students into pairs / small groups.
2. Give out the worksheets to each group and tell them to work out which word or phrase should appear in the
examples. Point out the same word will fill each space.
Example worksheet
denials flew around as a heady brew of sex, _____ and rock'n'roll surrounded the man who, by
continued joint efforts in the fight against _____ the abduction of Dr Humberto Alvarez
Even if he intends to, he is too high on _____ to remember what he has done with you.
between adults and young people on _____. Most of that gap is caused by our
want to know if your youngster is using _____. What should you be looking out for? One
gather evidence proving that Collins was a _____ dealer so he could get the leadership to
and 4 per cent said they had misused _____, probably tranquillisers or sleeping agents
have been so different for me. Kids get into _____ and they have no enthusiasm for life.
aying buildings which had become a haven for _____, violence and despair.
police officer, Greathouse gave up hard _____ about a month ago. Now, he's on a waiting
3. Once they have worked out what the missing word / phrase is, get them go over it and find the collocations and/or
colligations.
Note
I would recommend leaving the examples as they are. Don’t be tempted to fettle with them and try to tidy them up in
any way.
Variation
Take the students to the computer room and get them to make worksheets for each other: finding and selecting the
examples is at least as useful as, and much more creative than, solving the puzzle.
(This activity has been reproduced from ‘Vocabulary’ by John Morgan, OUP 2004
How to avoid bum answers
Some words can be difficult for students to understand and use correctly. Often these words need more than
explanations, and showing the word(s) common collocations can help students come closer to the words meaning
and use. A particular favourite example of mine is the phrasal verb ‘carry out’. Once upon a time a student asked
me what it meant, and I replied that it meant ‘do’. Said student seemed content with this explanation. I patted my
self on the back, finished the lesson off, and set the homework. As the students were leaving the class, I reminded
them to do their homework to which Little Johnny replied that he was going to carry out his homework as soon as
he got home. Duh! If only I had known about corpora and concordances then - I think the following activity would
have benefitted would have helped him.
Procedure
1. Select the item of lexis that you want the students to work on.
2. Go to either the British National Corpus or the Bank of English and type in your query.
3. Choose the lines that best illustrate said lexis.
4. Copy and paste the concordance lines into a word processor.
5. Print and make enough copies for one per student.
6. Instruct the students to look at the concordance lines and see if they can find any patterns.
7. Conduct a feedback sample and get the students to record the collocations in their vocabulary notebooks if you
have any students who can be bothered to invest in such a thing.
Read these concordance lines. Can you see any patterns? What type of things can be carried out?
• the testicles. This small operation is usually carried out using a local anaesthetic only.
• system support. Research is now being carried out to develop what has been described as
• withdraw. Since then, Indonesian soldiers have carried out mass killings. For 15 years, the world
• Be aware of the dates when repairs were carried out and where the guarantees can be found,
• had received serious head injuries. Surgeons carried out an operation yesterday. His parents had
• OXBRIDGE BIAS. A survey carried out by a Labour MP shows that many of the
• The inquiry into Wynn Jones was carried out by the Chief Constable of West
• Iraq has for the first time admitted that it carried out experiments in germ warfare, but it said
• women asked could. The advertising agency that carried out the research did so to prove to clients
• like that were all too frequent when TODAY carried out a survey into what voters think of the
• in 1992 for her last Christmas, surgeons carried out their first seven-organ transplant.
• The test, which at present can only be carried out in half a dozen laboratories around the world, seeks
to identify an abnormal antibody in the blood of likely sufferers.
• One per cent of the sample had puffed their first fag by the age of four, but the bulk of experimentation is
carried out by 9-;12 year olds.
• The Consumer Concerns survey carried out by the National Consumer Council (NCC) in 1979-;80
revealed a quarter of all respondents encountering problems walking in the previous year, over half of
which were considered serious.
• A rapid and anonymous survey carried out in Birmingham, England, is described by Rimmer (1982).
• If such tests have been correctly carried out (statistically speaking) market efficiency (as opposed to
speculative efficiency) may still be valid.
• We welcomed the news that the Indonesian authorities were mounting an investigation, which would
have to be carried out promptly, fully and fairly.
So what is culture?
Time 60 minutes
Aims To raise students’ awareness of the many components of culture; to encourage them to reflect on aspects
of their own culture.
Preparation
1. Make enough copies of Worksheet A for one per student.
2. Make copies of a concordance line for ‘culture’. Alternatively or additionally, make enough copies of Worksheet B
for one per student.
be brief, but it is certainly steeped in culture. [p] Modern times have taken their toll, but
what Mrs Thatcher used to call a dependency culture. That thrives. There is great support for
cultural practice: in short, a professional culture that would take child protection into the
connection between Christianity and Western culture came under strain and how that led
you could admire the awful products of popular culture and the consumer society really began in the
Fichte, and here Ashton's mastery of German culture proves invaluable. Not that she makes
bike to school in an astonishing attack on car culture by Transport Secretary Dr Brian Mawhinney.
into slavery, then stripped of their tribal culture and held in bondage; and then allowed, so
toward women are part of the military culture that needs to change. [p] Wertheimer: On the
in his own alienation from the prevailing mass culture of the United States. It seemed to him that
Worksheet 1
Elements of Culture
Cultural pursuits
Literature
Folklore
Art
Music
Artefacts
Ideas Behaviours
Beliefs Customs
Values Habits
Institutions Food
Leisure
Child-rearing
Procedure
1. Lead a discussion on the meaning of ‘culture’. Ask students:
• How do we recognize a culture?
• What are the elements that make up a culture?
• How important is culture?
• How are language and culture related?
• Can we learn a language without becoming involved in its culture?
• Do all members of a recognizable group share the same culture?
Take about 15 minutes over this, and let the discussion be as wide-ranging as possible.
2 Distribute Worksheet A. Students work individually and note down specific elements of their own culture which
match the categories. For example, under food, they might note ‘vegetarian’ or ‘no alcohol, or ‘past/pizza’. Allow 15
minutes for this.
3 Students share their findings with a partner, looking for commonalities and differences.
4. Conduct a full-class feedback session. Ask:
• What key factors emerged when you compared your cultures?
• What additional light do they shed on the meanings we associate with culture?
QUIZ TIME
1. Which is the more common, ‘a’ or ‘the’?
2. What are the 10 most common words used in English?
3. Think of any one of the 250 most common words used in English. How frequent do you think it is? If it occurs
once in every x words, do you think x is closest to:
a. 100 b. 1000 c. 5000 d. 50,000 e. 100,000
4. What percentage of the words in the 10-million-word corpus do you think would occur only once in the corpus?
a. 50% b. 25% c. 10% d. 5% e. less than 5%
5. We say that word A collocates with word B if the two words co-occur ‘frequently’. What do you think ‘frequently’
means here? On what percentage of occasions of occurrence of word A, do you think word B co-occurs with word
A? Is it:
A. 90% b. 50% c. 25% d. 10% e. 5%
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