USING CORPORA TO TEACH COLLOCATIONS IN A UNIVERSITY EFL CONTEXT

“…the holistic nature of learning, the nature of natural language – collocations will become so central to everyday teaching”. Lewis (2006) Teaching collocations: Further developments in the Lexical Approach

USING CORPORA

TO TEACH COLLOCATIONS

IN A UNIVERSITY EFL CONTEXT

Supervisor: Tran Huong Quynh (Ph.D) Presenter: Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen

OVERVIEW OF MY THESIS GRADUATION

INTRODUCTION

“…the holistic nature of learning, the

to everyday teaching”.

INTRODUCTION

Lewis (2006) - Teaching collocations: Further developments in the Lexical Approach

Investigates the teaching of

collocations in academic writing

based on corpus linguistics

Objectives

INTRODUCTION Rationale

Reduce “learning burden” - learners’ effort

to learn vocabulary.

Enrich learners’ lexical resources in

academic writing.

INTRODUCTION

Why corpus-based method?

✓ Corpus (corpora) - a collection of

texts, written or spoken, which is stored on computers.

✓ “A living dictionary” - provides learners with

authentic languages and examples through concordance lines.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Lexical approach

• Emerged and officially introduced since 1993 by Lewis.

• “Without grammar little can be conveyed, without

vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”

(Nation, 2007)

→ Lexical approach which focuses on much on developing

learners’ proficiency with words.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Direct application of corpus linguistics

Applications of corpora in language teaching

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

METHODOLOGY

Mutual information score

(MI-score)

Type-token ratio (TTR)

Academic word list (AWL)

Lexical density (LD)

4 KEY CRITERIA

TO EVALUATE

STUDENTS’ WRITING

MUTUAL-INFORMATION SCORE

(MI SCORE)

✓ Indicates the strength of a collocation.

✓ Measures the amount of

non-randomness present when two words occur.

✓ MI score > 3 → significant collocation

MUTUAL-INFORMATION SCORE

(MI SCORE)

✓ Indicates the strength of a

✓ Measures the amount of

occur.

✓ MI score > 3 → signiificant collocation

• fB = Number of occurrences of the collocate in the whole

corpus.

• fAB = Number of occurrences of the collocate in the concordance

TYPE - TOKEN RATIO (TTR)

✓ A measure of vocabulary diversity in a

corpus, equal to the total number of types

divided by the total number of tokens

✓ The closer the ratio is to 1 (or 100%), the

more varied the vocabulary is.

ACADEMIC WORD LIST (AWL)

✓ The percentage of academic word listed

in a corpus or in a student’s writing.

✓ The higher AWL index, the more

improvement in terms of using academic vocabulary items students are able to obtain during the course.

LEXICAL DENSITY (LD)

✓ Measures the ratio of lexical words

(information-carrying words) and function words.

✓ Calculated based on this formula:

LD = (Number of lexical words/ total

number of words) x 100

Phase 1 (Before the course)

✓ Pre-test for group classification

✓ Students were required to write a mini

writing test (around 200 words)

Phase 2 (Immediately after the course)

2 different six-week courses – applied for two different groups.

CG (Rule-based method)

EG

(Corpus-based method)

Phase 2 EXPERIMENTAL GROUP

10 academic articles (Topic: Health)– collected and put into a

specialized corpus “Health articles”

Phase 2 EXPERIMENTAL GROUP

Put all articles in the LANCSBOX 4.0 application

Use KWIC (Key words in context) to search collocations

Phase 2 EXPERIMENTAL GROUP

Use Sketch Engine to discover more premodifier-noun collocations

Phase 2 EXPERIMENTAL GROUP

Calculate the MI-score

of top 15

premodifier-noun collocations

Phase 2 EXPERIMENTAL GROUP

Phase 2 CONTROL GROUP

✓ Handout 10 selected articles for students.

✓ Skim and scan the text to find new vocabulary

items.

✓ Note down and access to dictionary.

✓ No corpus use.

Phase 3 (2 Weeks after the course)

Both groups were required to write an approximate 300- word essay about a chosen topic

Phase 3 (2 Weeks after the course)

COSE (Corpus of Student's

Essays - 14.987 tokens)

COSE - EG (Experimental group - 7864 tokens)

COSE - CG (Control group

- 7123 tokens)

COSE - EG - P1 (Before - 2765 tokens)

COSE - EG - P2 (After - 2343 tokens)

COSE - EG - P3 (After two weeks - 2756 tokens)

COSE - CG - P1 (Before - 2231 tokens)

COSE - CG - P2 (After - 2116 tokens)

COSE - CG - P3

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

MAIN FINDINGS

Phase 1 Misuse of collocations

Phase 2 • • The decrease of misusing collocations The tendency of using more compound

premodifiers as adjectives

Phase 3 The occurrence of more

academic collocations

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

Phase 1 Collocations in students’ writing in

Phase 1 (with MI-score)

Collocations should be replaced

(with MI-score)

Hard schedule (MI = 2.356)

Hectic schedule (MI = 6.7) Outside activities

(MI = 2.19)

Extracurricular activities

(MI = 5.65) Male career

(MI = 1.34)

Male profession (MI = 8.64) Significant workloads

(MI = 1.27)

Heavy workloads (MI = 6.3) Busy schedule Hectic schedule

Finding 1:

Misuse of

collocations

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

Phase 2

Sedentary lifestyle (MI = 4.85)

Unhealthy lifestyle (MI = 2,78)

Ultra-processed food (MI = 5.6)

Fast food (MI = 3.43)

Whole food (MI = 4.21) Unhealthy food (MI = 2.64) Adverse impact (MI = 4.56) Negative effect (MI = 3.02)

Finding 2:

The decrease

of misusing

collocations

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

“In the recent time, unhealthy diet is definitely listed as one of the major factors

causing overweight It is acknowledged that the fast- paced life due to remarkable

advanced technologies exerts a negative bearing on eating lifestyle, the standarddaily meals are not nutritious as they were Take ultra-processed food as anexample Many young people are addicted to dining out in budget- friendly fast foodjoints and street vendors where fat ingredients and preservatives are prevalent.Additionally, officers now are snowed under with the great number of work, whichmeans they have no time for food preparation and have no choice except to dine out

more often for on-a-daily-basis meals Unquestionably, the more frequently they get

used to this, the more probably they might go down with obesity as well as otherfatal diseases.”

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

Phase 3

Index Control Group

(including 14 files, 1842 tokens, 612 types)

Experimental Group (including 14 files, 1792 tokens, 634 types) TTR 33.2 % 36.8%

AWL 6.05% 9.91%

Two weeks after the course

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

CONCLUSIONS, LIMITATIONS

AND PEDAGOGICAL SUGGESTIONS

• Collocation – an fundamental language phenomenon

• Vocabulary – should be learned in chunks (not word by word)

• Corpus-based method – more effective in teaching collocations

than the rule-based method (Authentic language)

• 4 main findings:

- Misuse of collocations

- The decrease of misusing collocations

- The tendency of using more compound premodifiers as

adjectives

- The occurrence of more academic collocations

(10 articles and 28 selected participants)

Pedagogical suggestions:

✓ Elementary level : Gap filling or matching

collocations

✓ Upper-mediate level or Advanced level :

Teaching collocations in a reading-writing

integrated course → Boost lexical resources

and collocational competence at the same time.

THANKS