1. Memory Strategy – Using Mental Images
(Adapted from forthcoming “Loong Y & Chan S W L, A Study of Vocabulary Learning Strategies Adopted by Dentistry Students in Hong Kong In Learning Specialized Dental Vocabulary, September 2012, Asian ESP Journal”)

2. Memory Strategy – The Keyword Technique
Step One: Think of a word that you know that has a similar sound (audionym “Keyword” )
Step Two: Create a mental image to link up the Keyword with the target word
(Adapted from Brahler, C. J. & Walker, D. (2008). Learning scientific and medical terminology with a mnemonic strategy using an illogical association technique. Advances in Physiology Education, 32, )

3. The “keyword” technique
Japanese word and meaning
English word that has a similar sound
Link and visual image created
kurai (dark)
karada (body)

4. The “keyword” technique
Japanese word and meaning
English word that has a similar sound
Link and visual image created
kurai (dark)
cry
A baby cries when it is dark
karada (body)
colored
a colored body

5. Kurai - Cry
Imagine the visual of a baby crying when it’s dark

6. Karada - colored
a colored body

7. Use of Concordancers
A corpus (plural corpora) – a large collection of texts, written or spoken, stored on a computer.
A concordancer – a computer programme used to search this database

8. Considerations
General English / Academic English / Specialised English (e.g. medical, law, 1K and 2K graded, UWW corpora on Compleat Lexical Tutor
Written / Spoken?
Size?
Currency?
Free of charge?

9. Corpus Size
“I don’t think there can be any corpora, however large, that contain information about all of the areas of English….that I want to explore [but] every corpus that I’ve had a chance to examine, however small, has taught me facts that I couldn’t imagine finding out about in any other way.” (Fillmore, 1992, p. 35)

10. Use of Corpora
Word lists and dictionary entries (different senses of a word / typical examples of usage / frequency information) are compiled by computational linguists using a corpus of the language.
E.g. the COBUILD project was the first project using a computerised corpus for dictionary making
in the 1980s, Collins started to use a computerised corpus (then called the COBUILD corpus) with John Sinclair of University of Birmingham; now the Collins Cobuild Corpus has 2.5 billion words (part of which is the Bank of English Corpus)

11. Major Corpora
Matching exercise

12. Major corpus: BNC 100 million words
Written (90%) and spoken (10%) samples
British English from the 1980’s to 1993
General English

13. Major corpus: Brown corpus
1 million words
American English
One of the earliest corpora / compiled in 1960s
500 text samples from 15 text categories
Searchable through Compleat Lexical Tutor at

14. Major corpus: Bank of English
Part of Collins Cobuild Corpus
450 million words as of 2005 (650 million words as of 2012)
75% written and 25% spoken
70% British, 20% American and 10% others
Contemporary English

15. Major Corpus: The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
Contemporary American English containing about 450 million words (from 1990 to 2011)
five genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals

16. Major corpus: MICASE Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
started in 1997
contains transcripts and audio files of academic speech

17. Some user-friendly concordancers
Word Neighbors (developed by University of Science and Technology)
COCA (needs registration)
Create your own concordance using tools provided by CAES, HKU:

18. Tasks - answers
The public have expressed concern about … / … are of great concern to the public
Improve / increase / promote efficency
Substitute for

19. How can corpora be used in the classroom?
Among these suggestions by Nicholas Medley, which ones are applicable in your classroom?

20. Using Word Neighbours
Which 3 nouns come most frequently after “underlying”? Then, compare your results with examples from a dictionary.
How to use the phrase “not only … but (also) …”

21. Answers Word Neighbours: Underlying cause/s Underlying assumptions
Underlying principle
Cambridge Dictionary Online:
Underlying significance
Not only (verb) but also (verb)
Not only (noun) but also (noun)
Not only (adjective) but also (adjective)
Not only (prep + noun) but also (prep + noun)

22. How can concordancers be used to facilitate vocabulary learning/teaching?
See which words are low-frequency words (off-list words using Vocab Profiler) to see which words are likely to cause difficulty (can pre-teach these words), and see whether a text is likely to cause difficulty to students.
Study words in context and increase depth of processing
Check grammatical behaviour of words e.g. what prepositions to use after a verb
Check collocations and lexical patterns
Find out about the frequencies of words / word combinations
Find out about usage of a word in different text types (e.g. fiction vs academic / spoken vs written), e.g. by using “Range” on Compleat Lexical Tutor

23. Preparation for next class
Give an oral outline of your assignment
Can consider:
Conference abstracts of JALT Vocabulary Symposium (2012) (post-session 4 reading)