1. Making useful wordlists for ELT
Topical vocabulary from the WWW
Simon Smith & Scott Sommers
Ming Chuan University, Taipei
Adam Kilgarriff, Lexical Computing Ltd, UK
Generous support from National Science Council, Taiwan

2. Outline Importance of learning natural English
Wordlists in English learning
Making relevant wordlists
Using two corpus analysis tools
WebBootCat
Sketch Engine
Conclusions and future plans

3. The problem Learning non-authentic English
It’s raining cats and dogs!
Long time no see!
In Taiwan, all students learn these
They may believe they are authentic
But English speakers hardly use them!

4. Word and phrase lists Students must learn vocabulary
It is best to learn vocabulary through practice:
Reading
Speaking to American people
Interacting in the language
That is difficult for Asian students
In Taiwan, students must learn vocabulary from lists

5. From the MOE 6000 word high school list
Probably useful for policy makers
May be useful for teachers
Not useful for learners
Better to organize wordlists by topic?

6. So, we should teach vocabulary by topic?
Khmer learning Game © North Illinois University

7. From the ELC textbook
Unit 1
Getting started at University
Nouns
attendance course
facilities helmet
initiative major
vendor
Verbs
accomplish consider
improve tease
Adjectives
challenging fortunate
impatient occasional
protective
It is not easy to make up a good vocabulary list for an abstract topic
Try these topics:
Unit 1: Getting started at University
Unit 2: Family and Hometown
Unit 3: English and You
Please
Choose a topic
Write down some good keywords
Better use computer to help us!

8. Getting wordlists from the web

9. WebBootCat: making corpora from the web
User chooses some seed words
For example freshman and university
WebBootCat
searches Yahoo for seed words
throws away lists of numbers, HTML, prices lists…
puts all running text into a corpus
tags the corpus (noun, verb etc) if required

10. WebBootCat passes query to Yahoo!
User enters seed words
WebBootCat passes query to Yahoo!
$$$$$ £££££
*&%^
WebBootCat throws away non-data web pages
WebBootCat puts text pages in corpus

11. Now, we can use Sketch Engine software to make a concordance
If I write notes, will they appear???

12. Or, we can make a wordlist, using WebBootCat

13. Now, we can bootstrap a new wordlist
Now, we can bootstrap a new wordlist. We use the first wordlist as seed words for the second one.

14. Now, let’s make a list of multi-word terms.

15. Advantages of automatic wordlist creation
contain relevant, topical vocabulary
created easily and conveniently
of course, we can select the words manually, from the automatic list!

16. Disadvantages of manual wordlist creation
It is difficult to get inspiration to make good wordlists manually.
Manual wordlists may include rare or unnecessary vocabulary.

17. Future work: Automatic cloze exercise generation
Q: It’s a ___ day today!
Choose:
(a) toasty
(b) tepid
(c) lukewarm
(d) sunny

18. Summary: making wordlists
choose a topic
get a topic corpus from the web
extract topic wordlist from it
Use recursive bootstrapping to extend the wordlist
include multi-word terms in the wordlist

19. Thank you