Using Corpus Tools to Highlight Academic Vocabulary in SCLT

Using Corpus Tools to Highlight Academic Vocabulary in SCLT

by Donley and Reppen (2001)

What are the advantages of using corpus techniques to identify important academic vocabulary words? This article offer a few pedagogical usages and application of corpus tools for teaching vocabulary. It also helps Sustained content language teaching (SCLT) teachers to be able to integrate academic vocabulary teaching into their instruction.

What are the SCLT? Donley and Reppen (2001) generally define SCLT as follows: “highly salient due to its relationship with the targeted topic, conceptually related to other content words within the unit, restricted in use within one discipline easily explainable, typographically enhanced within textbooks, defined within text, and crucial to the instruction of the content.”

I definitely agree that corpus linguistic technology provide teachers and students with a principled, holistic, and empirical way to identify useful vocabulary. Teachers can use them in two ways. Firstly, they may use corpus tools to develop and adapt materials. Secondly, they may use corpus tools when they help students explore academic vocabulary through classroom activities. Another advantage of using the corpus tool is creating and adapting materials depending on teacher’s selection of academic textbooks. Donley Reppen (2001) suggests that teachers may us corpus tools for assessment, text enhancement, and material development. Especially during the class, teachers may use concordance lines, frequency lists, and extended concordance displays to devise an activity designed to target specific vocabulary words.

In conclusion, since corpus based tool and pedagogical techniques are very accessible for teachers to utilize them in class, as part of SCLT, this article provides them with information to guide vital instruction to “stress language development within SCLT.”

Polarity Sensitivity of "much and many" by Register Variation

10th Conference for the American Association for Corpus Linguistics

October 7th Friday

Topic: Polarity Sensitivity of “much and many” by Register Variation

Presented by Lee, Ji Won at University at Buffalo; State University of New York

    What is NPIs? NPIs refer to negative polarity items which are words or expression appeared in a limited context. The limited context could be shown in the scope of negation or in a question. If a proper licensing condition is violated or failed to be assigned, the sentence could be NPI ungrammatical. The examples provided by Lee (2010) are as follows.

(1) You know it doesn’t cost much to do it. (Santa Barbara Corpus)

(2) ?? You know it costs much to do it.

(3) Do you all have much pollution there? (Switchboard Corpus)

(4) ?? We all have much pollution here.

(5) That future owed much to the modernist dreams of women’s emancipation and individual freedom. (Corpus of Contemporary American English, 2010, Anthropological Quarterly)

(6) There was much embracing, much exclaiming. (Brown Corpus)

    Lee suggests four (4) NPIs’ semantic and syntactic features and patterns. She states that "much" in the spoken language has progressed faster in its development into an NPI than in the written register. She also demonstrated that thorough analysis of "much" occurring in different NPIs can provide with more insights about semantic features. According to Lee (2010), her analysis of "much" proves that "much" followed by a definite NP tends to be used in positive contexts. She added we can find a stronger NPI tendency in the spoken and the written resgiters.

    In the presentation, Lee emphasized that this study could be meaning in that it is one of the studies revisited the historical development of NPIs and provided explanation relating to register variation. The main point was about the English-Specific phenomena of NPI-PPI pairs and negation types.

Cultural Impressions

IEP Professional Development Session

Thursday, April 19, 2012

1:30- 2:30

AL/ESL Conference Room

Cultural Impressions
Your student could be a big fish in their country. Encourage them to be a big fish in a big world.

Jonathan J. Orr, Ph.D., LPC, NCC
Clinical Assistant Professor
Department of Counseling and Psychological Services

Managing Within-Group Differences: Balancing Competency with Complexity

Dr. Jonathan Orr will discuss his work on cultural competency and the importance of recognizing characteristics of individual people when working with groups of people from other cultures.  The session includes experiential exercises designed to cultivate a more complex view of cultural competency. 

  

    When encountering second lanaguage learners, the lecturer said we should keep in mind that your student was a big fish in their counties and encourage students to be a big fish in the big world. Personally, this comment was very impressing.Emphasizing the culture influence, the lecturer, Jonathan provided us with a simple exercise.

My name is…(Joohyun Chun)

My mountain is …(high and steep)

My valley is …(peaceful and full of flowers.)

My river is …(narrow)

My people are …(kind and friendly)

I am…(humble)

       When interacting with others, people presume a number of things about others. The presumption is about you and others around you. Individual is more than culture difference. The lecture points out that we tend to rely on published book made out of cultural capsulation when we understand people from different countries. This kind of book can help people to have general background knowledge or to understand distinctive cultural patterns. However, there could be exception and unusual patterns out of typical characteristics. Even within one culture, individualism exists. Furthermore, people often change their persona based on the client who they talk with. According to the ecological theory, we can formulate the interaction and presumption among individuals like P(erson) x E(nvironment) = B(ehavior). People’s behavior could be decided by their personal background elements and environment about them. Person implies gender, age, education, socioeconomic situation, birth order and so on.

P(erson) x E(nvironment) = B(ehavior)

Reflection: People attending the lecture were English teachers or second language teachers’ teachers. The most impressive part of the lecturer presentation was that we’ve got to understand students’ cultural struggles. He also stated that the students could be a big fish in their country, but they are a small fish in this country. The point is teachers can encourage the students to be a bigger fish in the bigger world and validate the reason they should keep working to adopt themselves to a new environment.

A corpus Analysis of Male, Female, and Queer Speech

10th Conference for the American Association for Corpus Linguistics

October 7th Friday

Caskey, Forrest at Western Carolina University

Topic: A corpus Analysis of Male, Female, and Queer Speech

     According to Caskey (2010), the study about queer speech or gender linguistics has been mainly qualitative and theoretical. Referring to empirical and quantitative data provided by numerous scholars like Jacobs, Stokoe, Busholtz, and Lakoff, Caskey researched on recording and transcribing conversation of hetero or gay men and women for two years. To create a corpus of male, female, and queer speech, Caskey categorizaed queer conversation with different patterns as follows.

1. Hetero men talking
2. Hetero women talking
3. Hetero woman – man talking
4. Gay men talking
5. Gay women talking
6. Gay men with hetero man talking

     Most of all, I was very interested in the topic, and the method of study was interesting as well. Caskey especially studied on the discourse elements and discourse strategies. The discourse elements include topic choice, method of holding the floor using hedges, tags, back channels, and interruptions. His interest was to recognize linguistic and discourse features which can discriminate speech according to genders or sexuality. The results suggested by Caskey are as follows.

1. “Queer male speech appears to be more aligned with hetero male speech while from a linguistic paradigm queer male speech aligns closer to female speech.”

2. “Designation of femininity of queer male speech was misleading.”                           Caskey (2010)

This study could be very meaningful in the corpus research area since there was little study based on the quantitative research or corpus analysis.