Beyond Web VP: New ways of using Lextutor Marti Sevier Simon Fraser University TESL Canada October 14, 2012

Overview  What is Lextutor?  Why? Learning outcomes/rationale  How can it be used? A sequence of tasks  How would you like to use it?  References  Questions/contact

What is Lextutor?Lextutor

Using Lextutor Learning outcomes/rationale  Text analysis: identify vocabulary items for teaching and learning  Practice based on… Multiple exposures Multiple, authentic contexts Opportunities for deep processing

Expansion of vocabulary knowledge: Meaning in different contexts Word families Collocation Register Grammatical associations (colligation) Etc.

Background: A brief word about word lists  GSL: 1953, West, rev. 1995, Bauman & Culligan –2000 headwords  UWL: 1984, Xue & Nation  AWL: 2000, Coxhead 570 headwords  BNL: 2005, Neufeld & Billuroglu— 2709 words  BNC-20: 2010, Cobb—20,000 words

Background: corpora What is a corpus?  A corpus is a collection of texts of written (or spoken) language presented in electronic form. It provides the evidence of how language is used in real situations, from which lexicographers can write accurate and meaningful dictionary entries. By analysing the corpus and using special software, we can see words in context and find out how new words and senses are emerging, as well as spotting other trends in usage, spelling, world English, and so on. Source: About the Oxford English Corpus,

Corpora and word lists  GSL: partially corpus-based but also compilation of words voted upon by committee words  UWL: compilation of 4 lists: Lynn (1973), Campion and Elley (1971), (corpus-based), and Ghadessy (1979), and Praninskas (1972) (lists based on student annotations of words in texts).  AWL: corpus-based: academic texts in arts, commerce, law, and science (3.5 million running words)  BNL: based on commonly used word lists which are corpus-based, the Brown Corpus (1 m. words from range of written sources), and the British National Corpus (BNC) (100 million words from written and spoken sources)  BNC-20: based on British National Corpus

How can Lextutor be used? A sequence of tasks 1.KeyWords, WebVP: identify words for study 2.ID output: word recognition, spelling 3.Cloze: meaning, context, collocation, colligation 4.Familizer: word families 5.Concordancer: collocation, text patterns 6.GroupLex: all of the above...and more

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze  Text analysis tools: selecting words 1.KeyWords ExtractorKeyWords Extractor

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze  Text analysis tools: selecting words 1.KeyWords ExtractorKeyWords Extractor 22 key words (proper nouns eliminated) freshwater maritime drought province navigate bureau lake river species pollute ship fish factory reach water previous city continue short include direct total

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--1  Text analysis tools: selecting words Web Vocabulary Profiler (Web VP)

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--1  Text analysis tools: selecting words Web Vocabulary Profiler (Web VP ) AWL GSL K1: city continue direct factory fish include lake reach river ship short total water GSL: K2: 0 AWL: previous OFF LIST: bureau drought freshwater maritime navigate pollute province species

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--2  Text analysis tools: selecting words: the BNL

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--2  Text analysis tools: selecting words BNL bnl-1 city continue direct include previous reach short total water bnl-2 factory river ship bnl-3 fish lake bnl-4 decline bnl-5 central meters statistics bnl-6 species OFF LIST freshwater maritime drought province navigate bureau pollute

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--3  Text analysis tools: selecting words: the BNC-20

Take one text: Plight of the Yangtze--3 BNC-20  BNC 1000: city continue direct fish include previous short total water  BNC-2,000: factory reach river ship  BNC-3,000: lake pollute species  BNC-4,000: bureau province  BNC-5,000: drought  BNC-6,000: navigate  BNC-8,000: maritime

A couple of caveats:  Infrequent ≠ difficult/necessary  Teacher knowledge is key  Curricular/syllabus demands

12 words… drought maritime navigation reaches factories species bureau levels include continue director pollute

Application 1: I-D Word identification quiz I-D Word identification quiz Rationale:  Word recognition/spelling  Increases speed of recognition  Provides multiple contexts for words

Application 2: rational cloze passage rational  Why cloze? learners appear to like it, and [it can] train learners to read and rewrite a text with a vocabulary focus (Lee, 2008) Requires reader to use contextual clues to fill in gaps (Raymond, 1988)

…and a second cloze  Video cloze Video cloze  Caveat: keep length short, about 2-3 minutes  How to: Go to page source, search “embedurl” (no quotes) Copy the link without quotation marks and paste into create page

Application 3: A word and more words: familizerfamilizer … rather than talking about “knowing a word”, we should be talking about “knowing a word family” (Nation 2001:47). ======================== 12 words: drought maritime navigation reaches factories species bureau levels include continue director pollute

Familizer output 12 words: drought maritime navigation drastic reaches factories statistics species decline percent bureau levels marine chemical director 76 bureau bureaus continue continual continually continuance continued continuity continues continuing continuous continuously continuation continuations direct directed undirected directing directly director directors directorship directorships directs indirect indirectly directness directnesses drought droughts factory factories include included includes including incl inclusive inclusion level levelled leveller levelling leveled leveler leveling levels levelly maritime navigate navigated navigating navigates navigation navigations navigational navigator navigators circumnavigate circumnavigates circumnavigated circumnavigating circumnavigation pollute pollutes polluted polluting polluter polluters pollutant pollutants pollution pollutions antipollution reach reached reaches reaching species

Application 4: the concordancer  Collocation: “two or more words that occur frequently together” (Shin & Nation, 2007, 41)  Why? 1. develop greater fluency 2.Achieve “naturalness”, e.g. “do my best” vs. “try my best”

Concordancer  Our word list again: drought maritime navigation drastic reaches factories statistics species decline percent bureau levels marine chemical director Compare collocation in the passage to collocation in a concordancer

ConcordancerConcordancer: language analysis  What are two different meanings of “reaches” in the passage? Water in the upper reaches decreased by over 60 percent from the previous year… ….. in the middle reaches of the river. Water depth at Yichang and Jingjiang in the middle reaches of the river no longer reaches the navigation standard of 2.9 meters  Which use is more common? Compare to the concordance lines.

ConcordancerConcordancer: “reaches”  Out of 53 concordance lines, only about 10% use “reaches” as it is used in the passage.  Questions for students to consider” Part of speech: noun or verb? If a noun: singular or plural? Context: in what type of texts might ths word be used? To what topics is it related?  Note: use “all of the above under “Corpus”.

ConcordancerConcordancer: comparison  Ask Ss to check collocations by typing into concordancer X Students who cram for tests have increased risk for psychological harm.  OR Collect common collocation errors: mix with correct collocations: use “extract” to pull up examples. We then run the risk of being injured. Students who cram for tests have increased risk for psychological harm. A message runs … a risk of being distorted if it is to be relayed more than about six..times. NOTE: Consider whether you are looking for a collocation to the left or to the right of the word. Here it is “left” because we want to look at the word/s that FOLLOW risk.

Putting it together: GroupLexGroupLex Student-driven learning –New or recycled vocabulary –Interactive: Ss set quizzes in pairs, trade –Personalized: focus on “their” area –Multiconc option: increased exposure, contexts –Easy to monitor –Contact Tom Cobb to set up a site for your students.

Now you try it / Questions?

After thoughts  Marti’s contact:  Tom Cobb’s contact: (for Grouplex setup—takes about a week)  Join Lextutor on FB!