1. Corpus construction and specialist vocabulary learning
by Chinese and Finnish EAP students
Nicole Keng
University of Vaasa
Simon Smith
Coventry University

2. Outline Background Motivation for corpus construction
Research questions
UK study
Finland study
Findings
Future directions

3. DDL: corpus consultation
Authentic
Representative
But
“In a nutshell, learners and teachers simply aren’t convinced.” (Boulton 2008)
Looking at data may be difficult or boring for some
“Reading concordances is too tough for most learners. It’s an advanced linguistic skill” (Kilgarriff 2008)

4. How to motivate? Task outcomes: sense of ownership (Tyne 2009)
Movie-making vs. in-class presentation
Blogging vs. hand-writing assignments
Making a corpus vs. using a corpus
Deployment of non-language skills
IT skills
Specialist knowledge
Hobbies
Academic major

5. Corpus construction by learners
Zanettin (2002:7)
learners compile a corpus from the web, and analyse it with Wordsmith Tools
"constructing the corpus was as useful as generating concordances from it”.
Charles (2012)
“revelatory moment when they see the patterns appear before their eyes in their own data”
Lee & Swales (2006) and Boulton (2008)
some students purchased own copies of Wordsmith Tools 

6. Aston (2002) Corpus construction vs. making a fruit salad!
Control. You can choose your own ingredients
Text types
Special domains
Certainty. If you make your own fruit salad, you know what went into it
Can identify texts
Understand why things are as they are
Creativity.
Corpus-making, like cooking, can be fun!
Critical awareness.
Through trial and error, and consulting books and experts, you will probably become a better chef (whether of corpora or fruit salads)
Communication. Making your own corpus or fruit salad can have more social spin-offs than opening a supermarket tin
opportunity to talk with co-constructors and with other chefs, as well as with the consumers of the end product.

7. This study Two EAP cohorts Credit bearing courses Coventry University
In-sessional
Coventry University
(nearly all) Chinese students
University of Vaasa
(all) Finnish students

8. Research questions
What do students think about studying specialist vocabulary using corpora?
Are there differences between perceptions of the two cohorts?
Are there differences in the progress made by the two cohorts?

9. UK cohort 94 international students 4 EAP groups (21-25n) IT literate
88 Chinese L1
AFIB major
Y3 top-up
4 EAP groups (21-25n)
IT literate
General vocabulary OK
Weaker areas
Subject knowledge
Technical vocabulary

10. Resources constructed and used by students
Specialized academic corpora
from course materials
and the web
Vocabulary portfolios
from these corpora

11. The AFIB course Duration: 1 year
Various modules in Accountancy, Finance and Business (50 ECTS)
EAP support module
10 ECTS
2 hours

12. Corpus construction teaching plan
Allow minutes per week
Familiarize students with corpus consultation
Use lecture slides to create mini-corpus
Use mini-corpus keywords to bootstrap web corpus
Use web corpus
for vocab and text study
to create Excel vocabulary portfolios
Occasional vocabulary quizzes

14. What can they do with the corpora?
Lists of domain words and multi-word units
Word sketches
Concordances
Link to original texts from WWW
Bootstrap new corpora from web
Create vocabulary portfolios

15. Course Moodle

16. Lecture slides example

21. Finland cohort 74 students at undergraduate level CEFR B2-C1
Stage 1: Exploring corpus with Sketch Engine
Concordances, Word Sketches, Sketch Differences, Thesaurus
Stage 2: Writing reflective vocabulary reports
Stage 3: Constructing corpora by collecting texts from their subject areas
Stage 4: Creating vocabulary portfolios
BNC
OWN CORPORA

22. Stage 1: Introducing Sketch Engine functions
Student training slide
Concordances give you
example sentences from the corpus
Word Sketches give you
summary of word usage, showing which other words commonly go with the keyword, and in what grammatical relation they stand to it
Sketch Differences show you
how apparently similar words differ in usage
Thesaurus shows you
a list of similar words to the keyword

23. Stage 2: Examples of reflective vocabulary reports
‘This function shows me different meanings of the word by giving me example sentences. I learnt that I can use the word profit in the meaning of advantage or good obtained from something. It can also be used in the meaning of money gained in business for instance: The resulting value is profit before tax.’ (Student 1) [our emphasis]

24. ‘Concordances shows me that one word can be connected to different meanings. The word turnover for example can be used in various meanings. It can mean company’s sales or the changes among employees.’ (Student 2)

25. ‘Word Sketches give me a summary of word usage, showing which other words commonly go with the keyword, and in what grammatical relation they stand to it. For example I learnt that the word profit as object can be used in a sentence like you can make a profit from services. It can be used with preposition for example in the sentence like he sold a car at a profit.’ (Student 1)

26. Stage 3: Creating a Corpus

27. Stage 4: Examples of Vocabulary Portfolio (Student 1)
Vaasan yliopisto

28. (Student 2)
Vaasan yliopisto

29. Vaasan yliopisto | Yksikkö | Kalvosarjan nimi
(Student 3)
Vaasan yliopisto | Yksikkö | Kalvosarjan nimi

30. Vaasan yliopisto | Yksikkö | Kalvosarjan nimi
(Student 3 again)
Vaasan yliopisto | Yksikkö | Kalvosarjan nimi

31. Survey results
Question: What is the most useful skill/knowledge you learned in this course?

32. Survey results
Question: What is the most enjoyable part of this course?

33. Student Feedback
‘It’s useful to find the right words to use when writing because sometimes I don’t know the best way to express what I want to say in my sentences.’
‘This is a very useful tool to improve own knowledge of vocabulary. In my case, it shows many words that have been used in the news and magazines.’
‘Using corpora is effortless and fun way to learn vocabulary!’
Creating a specialized corpus could be useful when it comes to researching a particular subject or learning a subject in English.
It is useful because of the different results which are much more relevant than searching on a much more general English corpus.
I thought that the Sketch Engine was useful software not only for my English study but also for AFIB study
In addition, the process of create my own corpora was very enjoyable and makes me sense of accomplishment.

34. Some differences (From reflective reports) Awareness of collocations
Grammar patterns
Exploratory approach
For example I learnt that the word profit as object can be used in a sentence like you can make a profit from services. It can be used with preposition for example in the sentence like he sold a car at a profit. (Student 1)
(From survey)
Still favour vocab quizzes, list-based learning
I like to remember words in a sentence. I think making word portfolio is good […] If it is used as a resource and read it again and again, it can be very useful. (Student 9)

35. Next steps Quantitative comparative study
Measure and compare effectiveness of our approach
Compare improvement of specialist vocabulary knowledge
Pre- and post-test
Qualitative study on vocabulary learning styles
Based on differences found in this study
Interviews
Investigate continuing use by students
"Ongoing use also indicates substantial commitment to the personal corpus" (Charles, 2014: 39)

36. Conclusion and Summary
A discovery-based approach
Promote learner-centredness and task ownership
Raise learner awareness of relationship:
Integrate language and transferable skills
“Using corpora in the classroom is FUN!”
exploration in language learning
learner progress

37. Links https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/ http://bootcat.sslmit.unibo.it/

38. References
Aston, G. (2002). The learner as corpus designer. In B. Kettemann, & G. Marko (Eds.), Teaching and learning by doing corpus analysis (pp. 9-25). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Boulton, A. (2008). Bringing corpora to the masses: free and easy tools for language learning. In N. Kübler (Ed.), Corpora, Language, Teaching, and Resources: From Theory to Practice Bern: Peter Lang. Charles, M. (2012). Proper vocabulary and juicy collocations: EAP students evaluate do-it-yourself corpus-building. English for Specific Purposes, 31, Charles, M. (2014). Getting the corpus habit: EAP students’ long-term use of personal corpora. English for Specific Purposes, 35, Kilgarriff, A., Husak, M., McAdam, K., Rundell, M. & Rychlý, P. (2008). GDEX: Automatically finding good dictionary examples in a corpus. In Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX International Congress, Barcelona, Catalonia Lee, D., & Swales, J. (2006). A corpus-based EAP course for NNS doctoral students: Moving from available specialized corpora to self-compiled corpora. English for Specific Purposes, 25(1), Tyne, H. (2009). Corpus oraux par et pour l'apprenant [Spoken corpora by and for the learner]. In A. Boulton (Ed.), Des documents authentiques oraux aux corpus: Questions d’apprentissage en didactique des langues (pp ). Nancy, France: Mélanges CRAPEL. Zanettin, F. (2002) DIY Corpora: The WWW and the Translator. In Maia, B., Haller, J., & Urlrych, M. (eds.) Training the Language Services Provider for the New Millennium. Porto: Facultade de Letras, Universidade do Porto,