May 2016 – English learning in Our World

Lexis is More than Words

As most of you know, I’m a great believer in lexis rather than words and also in corpora, when they are used in a principled way for teaching, so I was very happy to be asked to join the Online Corpus Symposium with Leo Selivan, Jennie Wright and Mura Nava the Virtual Round Table Conference last night. For anyone who wants to watch the videos of our talks here are the links:

Jennie Wright: https://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/_a875817169/p2s18o3lv1t/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal

Sharon Hartle: https://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/_a875817169/p3lgecco8p2/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal

Mura Nava:https://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/_a875817169/p7a0zkkbqbg/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal

Questions and Answers: https://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/_a875817169/p5oyh6x9h9y/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal

The conference is going on today and tomorrow as well so you are still in time to take part :-).

A Quick Overview

Jennie set the ball rolling with a very entertaining, interactive introduction to COCA showing teachers just how easy, fun and useful it is to create materials from a corpus for their class. She included worksheets on collocation work and also “guessing the key term” in a concordance search. What was good about this was that many of those in the audience said that her presentation was taking the “fear” out of corpora, and people felt very enthusiastic and keen to give it a go.

My presentation, I thought, provided a nice contrast to this because I was focusing on encouraging learners to be more independent. I introduced SkeLL, which I have written about before. SkeLL, or the Sketch Engine English Language Learning web interface, differs from many freely available online corpora in that it has been designed specifically for language learners and so it provides examples which are already filtered for different meanings and parts of speech, and it has a wonderful “word sketch” feature, which groups collocations according to grammatical categories related to the word or phrase being searched for. For instance, if you search for “rush” you can see a word sketch for the noun and a different one for the verb. I showed how I use a scaffolded approach to sensitizing my B2 learners to SkeLL to help them become more aware of features of co-text such as verb patterns and collocations, as this enables them to recognise much more quickly which answer is most appropriate in cloze tests etc.

Mura introduced the BYU Wikipedia Corpus, developed by the same Mark Davies of Bringham Young University who developed COCA as well. This is a new corpus which gives you the chance to create your own virtual corpus using Wikipedia texts on any subject you are interested in, and I still haven’t had time to try it out, but it looks great :-).

I promised the participants that I would post my slides so here they are, together with the handout I used with my learners and talked about in my presentation.

Enjoy 🙂