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THE
ISSUE NO. 4
WORKSHOP
LTC INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE / SEPTEMBER 2009 / VOLUME 1
Noticing and
Learning
Collocation
George Woolard uses key words to
unlock word partnerships.
In the ten years since the publication of
the Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis,
collocation, one of the central ideas of
the book, is beginning to establish itself
in English Language Teaching. This can
be seen from the growing trend in new
coursebooks of providing vocabulary
exercises on collocation, and setting
tasks which encourage the kind of
noticing that is essential to learning
collocation.
As teachers, we need to raise
awareness of collocation and to provide
activities and materials which help
develop learner competence. My own
approach is guided by the following
principles:
Learning new vocabulary is not just
learning new words, it is often learning
familiar words in new combinations.
Practice must be directed towards
helping the learner collocate words and
grammaticalise from word to sentence.
The noun provides the most efficient
focus for learning collocation.
Familiar words in new combinations
A learner can know the meaning of a
word, use it in a grammatically wellformed sentence and communicate
effectively, yet still fail to produce
acceptable English. For example,
1 Scientists are making research into
the causes of AIDS.
2 The result was an extreme
disappointment.
3 Well experience many costs, and few
benefits will come.
In each case, the learner understands
the highlighted word, but fails to
collocate correctly. Each of these
miscollocations has something
instructive to tell us about the nature of
collocation itself.
In 1, make should be replaced by do.
This example highlights the fixed nature
of collocation. There is no reason why it
should be do rather than make, it just is!
This is certainly true of verbnoun
collocations where the verbs do, get,
have, make, put and take carry little
meaning. This de-lexicalised use of the
verb accounts for an extremely large
number of collocations in English.
Teaching collocation
Exercise type 2
Choose the correct collocation:
Exercise type 3
Complete the sentences below
with a suitable preposition:
Three exercises
What are those initials for?
Slate idioms
Introduction
Over the past four decades or so, three
facts have become increasingly evident.
1. What a native-speaker writes and
says consists very substantially of
memorized combinations of words
rather than individual words
spontaneously combined in the mind of
the individual according to principles of
syntax. Erman and Warren (2000), for
instance, reckon the proportion of
chunks in spoken and written texts to
be about 55%. (See especially Wray
2002.)
2. The remarkable fluency of a typical
native-speaker is supported very largely
Conclusion
We do not claim that adoption of our
proposals would dispel every problem
connected with the Lexical Approach.
There simply is no magic wand for
learning the myriad chunks that are
worth learning by anyone wishing to
become a good, fluent user of an L2.
However, we do believe that teachers
and materials writers ought to pay more
attention to the factor of memory. In
particular, we believe that good results
can follow special in-class treatment of
chunks that are potentially memorable
because they are phonologically
repetitive (like fully functional), because
they are figurative (like bend the rules),
or because they are both (like lift the lid
[on a scandal]).
Preparation
Prepare your story by underlining the
chunks you want to target and
highlighting the last few word(s) just
before the chunk. To indicate good
pause points (see Procedure, below),
insert marks; in the text below we have
used double slashes. Note that it will
probably not be possible to focus on
every single chunk in the text.
Procedure
1. Tell your students that you are going
to read a story out loud, slowly and
dramatically. Add that
2. Sometimes you will pause and signal
that its memory-test time by snapping
your fingers or by giving them a
significant look.
3. You will then re-read part of what you
just read out (i.e., the words given in
bold in the example below), but then
you will pause.
4. They should try to say from memory
whatever words come next, right up to
where you paused in step a just above.
That is, they should call out the words
that are underlined in the example text
below.
Extension
Exploit the musical or literary effect of at
least one of the texts i.e., if its a song
sing or play it; if its a poem, ask each
group of four to plan and then deliver a
dramatic, group recital.
Review/Consolidation,
in the following lesson
perhaps
FIGURATIVE PHRASE
SUDDEN,
HARD
CONTACT
HEAT
MADNESS
MAGIC
DISABILITY,
HELPLESSNESS,
LOSS OF
CONTROL
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.
FIGURATIVE PHRASE
SUDDEN,
HARD
CONTACT
HEAT
MADNESS
MAGIC
DISABILITY,
HELPLESSNESS,
LOSS OF
CONTROL
HUNGER,
THIRST
x
x
{i.e.,as if
trapped
under a net
x
x
x
x
for a 'dual-mode' processing capacity, involving both itemlearning and system-learning, supplying short-term and
long-term needs respectively.
Meanwhile, Pawley and Syder (1983) not only proposed that
the adult language user has at their command a repertoire
of literally hundreds of thousands of what they called
'Iexicalised sentence stems', but that the goal of native-like
fluency requires of the second-language learner a similar
command, including the capacity to distinguish 'those usages
that are normal or unmarked from those that are unnatural
or highly marked' (ibid. p. 194). They concluded that the
native speaker's linguistic competence might be likened to a
'phrase book with grammatical notes'.
Two systems
In the light of these findings, the goals of second-language
teaching needed redefining. The notion of communicative
competence as being solely rule-based was insufficient. 'It is
much more a matter of knowing a stock of partially preassembled patterns, formulaic frameworks, and a kit of rules,
so to speak, and being able to apply these rules to make
whatever adjustments are necessary according to contextual
demands.' (Widdowson 1989, p. 135). In other words, two
systems coexist: a formulaic, exemplar-based one, and a
rule-based analytic one. Nevertheless, materials writers were
slow on the uptake, perhaps daunted by the sheer enormity of
this 'stock of partially pre-assembled patterns' and the
implications this might have on syllabusing and pedagogy.
Coursebooks became more, not less, analysis-based, and
only a handful of social formulae and sentence heads (How
do you do? Would you like...? Do you mind if I...?) were
taught as unanalysed units.
It was the advent of corpus linguistics, and of the COBUILD
project in particular (Sinclair 1987), that gave a new
impetus to a lexical view of language description and
acquisition. For a start, computers provided a powerful
means of highlighting patterns of repetition in text and were
quickly conscripted into identifying and categorising
habitual co-occurences of words such as collocations and
fixed formulaic phrases.
Conclusive evidence was found for the view that words hunt
in packs. Moreover, computers were also able to provide
reliable information as to word frequency, suggesting to
researchers like Willis (1990) that this information might
offer course designers the means to organise instruction
along lines that would better represent the learners' needs
than the conventional grammatical syllabus - a syllabus that
in Willis' view 'gives a very restricted picture of the grammar
of English' (p. 15). Accordingly, in what was billed by its
publishers as 'a major advance in the teaching of English',
Dave and Jane Willis wrote the Collins COBUILD English
Course (1988).
A Lexical Syllabus
They were driven by the wish to devise a syllabus that would
'specify the basic meanings of English, the meanings which
even the most elementary users of the language would need
to encode' (Willis, 1990, p. 45). Frequency information
offered the key: 'The commonest and most important, most
basic meanings in English are those meanings expressed by
the most frequent words in English' (ibid. p. 46).
Accordingly, the 700 most frequent words (which,
incidentally,' constitute some 70% of English text) were
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.
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:
species nouns:
quantifying collectives:
comparable to genitives:
nouns with -ful:
They also list well over a hundred short phrases - lexical bundles - which contain of, and which are
typical of academic writing. This small selection gives a flavour of how central such phrases are to this
kind of writing:
as a result of
in the case of
in the direction of
in the context of the
at the time of the
as a function of
in terms of
in the formation of
in the case of a
in a number of ways
similar to that of
at the level of
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.
No
T Are you sure? I dont believe you. (more silence and looking) What about the expression with risk? In all my
time as a teacher Ive 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 mustnt 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.
of them
of the children
of us
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.
This extract was taken from Natural Grammar by Scott Thornbury 2004, and published by Oxford University
Press. Available from all good ELT publishers.
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.
EVENTS
FURNITURE
HISTORY
IDEAS
MOVIES
EVENTS
FURNITURE
HISTORY
IDEAS
MOVIES
old
antique
ancient
new
recent
current
modern
old
antique
ancient
new
+
+
recent
current
modern
?
+
+
+
Essay Preparation
Choose a topic for a discursive essay, for example:
If we had more prisons, we would have fewer criminals. Do you agree?
Ask learners to write down four or five nouns you think they will need to write about the topic, for example:
prison
criminal
crime
sentence
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:
go to / send somebody to / sentence somebody to (7) years in prison
born / dangerous / hardened criminal
prevent / crack down on / petty / violent crime
death / heavy / life / severe / (3)-year sentence
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 Bs 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:
1. plain, dark, white, bitter, milk, bar of
chocolate
information
a theory
market
tax
You can do the same thing with adverbs and adjectives or verbs:
easy
fit
live
examine
Correcting Mistakes
There is a collocation mistake in each of these sentences. Correct them by looking up (at) the word in bold in (on) a
dictionary. All the mistakes are similar to (by) those made (done) by candidates in (at) the First Certificate exam
(quiz).
1. I was completely disappointed when I failed my exam.
2. When I did badly in the exam, it was a strong disappointment.
3. When you decide what to study, you must make a planned choice.
4. The holiday I went on last year was a full disaster.
5. What happened next was a really disaster.
6. Im afraid I would like to do a serious complaint.
7. If you want to lose weight, you need to make a diet.
8. Getting on a diet will help you.
9. If you are too fat, you need to miss some weight.
10.To improve your health you need to do some sacrifices.
11.If you want to be really fit, you need to make more exercise.
12.If you dont keep to your diet, you wont 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 dont 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.
2. Look up emergency. Then try to complete this short text:
Emergencies can never be ................. When they take ................., the emergency services swing into action. As part of
their everyday work, they ................ for an emergency so that when one .................... , they are ready for all
eventualities. Unfortunately, ............... emergencies happen all the time and cannot be ..................., even with the best
planning.
3. Look up hair. Then try to complete this short text:
Sandra had dull ............ hair. She had tried every kind of shampoo. She had tried ............ it a different colour. She had
even ............. it pure white just like Annie Lennox. Eventually, she had it all ................ off - start from scratch, she
said. But it grew back, the same ............. straggly hair she had hated even from childhood.
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.
bitterly disappointed
1. ........................ exhausted
2. ....................... disorganised
12........................ unexpected
3. ....................... handicapped
4. .......................disillusioned
5. ....................... greedy
6. ....................... honest
7. ....................... inaccurate
8. ....................... remarkable
9. ....................... sceptical
10. .......................theoretical
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
beyond all shadow of
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 ends 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.
(Start)
marketing
mix
retail
outlet
word
of mouth
target
customer
market
leader
main
competitor
selling
point
value
for money
point
of sale
income
bracket
niche
market
share
of the
market
(Finish)
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 - dont give a headword for a word that the students only know one or two
collocations for.
Fixed Phrases
Level: Advanced
Time: 60 minutes, plus follow-up
Aims: To draw students attention to the frequent use of prefabs in English; to encourage use of prefabs
appropriately in their use of English
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
you know
in fact
as a matter of fact
at any rate
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
all in all
by and large
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
by the way
if you like
so to speak
for example
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
no doubt about it
in my view
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
as we all know
in point of fact
by the time
in part
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
more or less
-----------------------------------
----------------------------------
----------------------------------
-----------------------------------
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 wasnt 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 its just a vague feeling of unease, a feeling that
something is not quite right, that things have changed in a way you cant describe but it is a feeling
that is real. And thats how it was for me, I think. It was like a virus - something sick in the air,
invisible but definitely there. Its 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.
Alan Maley, The Best of Times?
Procedure
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 learners 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, goodygoody, 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.
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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.
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.
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. Dont 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
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
what Mrs Thatcher used to call a dependency
cultural practice: in short, a professional
connection between Christianity and Western
you could admire the awful products of popular
Fichte, and here Ashton's mastery of German
bike to school in an astonishing attack on car
into slavery, then stripped of their tribal
toward women are part of the military
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
Values
Institutions
Customs
Habits
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?
Worksheet 1B
culture of inequality
culture of neglect
locker-room culture
medical culture
culture of secrecy
culture of violence
musical culture
national culture
barbaric culture
bar-room culture
drug culture
educational culture
peasant culture
popular culture
boardroom culture
Chinese/French/Hindu
feminist culture
gun culture
high culture
smoking culture
street culture
sustainable culture
teenage culture
tribal culture
visual culture
working-class culture
local culture
youth culture
culture
criminal culture
culture of abuse
culture of addiction
culture of consumption
culture of dependency
Follow-up
1. Then distribute Worksheet 1B and/or the concordance line. As a homework assignment, ask students to collect the
collocations which follow the word cultural from newspapers, the Internet (cultural concepts, cultural differences,
cultural diplomacy). In a future class, discuss what further light these cast on the notion of culture.
2. Set a written assignment on the topic: Cultural stereotypes: advantages and dangers. It is important to emphasize
that stereotypes can be very useful, because they offer a framework of expectations for dealing with the complexity
of a new situation; but they can also be a handicap if we use them to prejudice people from a different culture before
we have even met them. There are a number of helpful websites on the subject. See:
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/stereotype
www.newscientist.com/article.ns?=dn8111
Comments
1. Culture os a word used so frequently now that it has almost lost any real meaning. This activity is intended to stir
up the many interpretations which we unthinkingly give to culture, and to open our minds to the possibilities for
human contact that culture offers.
2. One way of thinking about culture is to consider it in the context of a family resemblance. This is a concept
proposed by the philosopher Wittgenstein. He applied it to many complex but ill-defined concepts, like games. When a
concept has a family resemblance, it shares a large number of characteristics, but not all of these are found in every
particular case. With culture, we may find a French person who eats baguettes (so do English people these days!),
speaks a non-standard variety of French, drives a Peugeot, drinks pastis, reads Charlie Hebdo, hates J. P. Sarte,
doesnt like cheese, etc. Some of these things are supposed to be typically (sterotypically) French, others are not. In
other words, we share many things in our culture with others- but not all of them. Hence the danger of stereotyping.
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%
For the answers, see below
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44
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22
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24
81
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12
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12
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ruO .tneuqerf ssel neve era yeht os ,rehtegot gnineppah sgniht erar ylevitaler owt evlovni snoitacolloc ;seicneuqerf
tol a ta kool uoy nehw tnereffid rehtar skool egaugnal ehT :niaga rialcniS etouq oT .elbailernu yrev era snoitiutni
.ecno ta ti fo