Vocab Assessment

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Vocab Assessment Corpora and Concordancing

• Major vocabulary assessment tools
• Major corpora and concordancers

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Vocabulary Assessment Tools

1. What aspects of vocabulary knowledge are being
   tested in each of the tests?
2. Do you see any problems with some of the tests?
3. Do you use some of these tests in your school?
   What other assessment tools do your school use?

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Various vocabulary assessment tools

• (available at http//www.lextutor.ca/tests/)
• Vocabulary Levels Tests (VLTs)
• To check vocabulary size
• Tests of vocabulary of different levels of
  frequency
• 2000, 3000, 5000, 10000-word levels AWL
• Aim at score of at least 80
• Word Association Test
• Meaning (different senses), collocations
• Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS)
• To check quality or depth of vocab knowledge
• Vocab Profiler
• Lexical richness (type/token ratio) more
  different words
• More frequent words or more low-frequency words

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Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS)

• retire
• iii. I have seen this word before and I think it
  means stop working because of old age (3 pts)
• iv. I know this word. It means stop working
  because of old age (3 pts)
• v. I can use this word in a sentence
• He spent more time with his family after retire.
  (4 pts)
• He spent more time with his family after he
  retired. (5 pts)
• He decided to retire. (? pts)

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VKS

• Reporting scale assume knowledge is
  linear-oriented
• Self-reported in nature
• Level V ability to produce sentence with target
  vocab ability to use the word appropriately?

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Discussion

• What is meant by a corpus in linguistics?
• What is a concordancer?
• What information can you obtain from using a
  corpus and concordancer?

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Use of Concordancers

• A corpus a large collection of texts, written
  or spoken, stored on a computer.
• A concordancer a computer programme used to
  search this database
• To lemmatise a word (e.g. activate activates /
  activated / activating)
• To tag a word class to each word

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Considerations

• General English / Academic English / Specialised
  English (e.g. medical and law corpora on
  LexTutor)?
• Written / Spoken?
• Size?
• Currency?
• Free of charge?

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Corpus Size

• I dont 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 Ive had a chance to examine,
  however small, has taught me facts that I
  couldnt imagine finding out about in any other
  way. (Fillmore, 1992, p. 35)

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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. 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 (http//www.collinslanguage.com/col
  lins-elt-learners-of-english/cobuild
  http//www.mycobuild.com/about-collins-corpus.aspx
  )
• E.g. Macmillan Dictionary http//www.macmillandic
  tionary.com/corpus.html

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Major corpus BNC

• 100 million words
• Written (90) and spoken (10) samples
• British English from the 1980s to 1993
• General English
• http//www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

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Major corpus Bank of English

• 450 million words by 2005
• 75 written and 25 spoken
• 70 British, 20 American and 10 others
• Contemporary English
• http//www.titania.bham.ac.uk/docs/svenguide.html

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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 LexTutor at http//www.lextutor
  .ca/concordancers/concord_e.html

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Major Corpus The Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA)

• Contemporary American English containing about
  450 million words
• from 1990 to present
• http//www.americancorpus.org/

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Major corpus MICASE

• Spoken academic English
• http//quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/

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Major corus International corpus of English

• East African English
• Indian English
• Singaporean English
• Hong Kong English
• http//www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice/
• (requires registration before downloading for
  free)

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Some user-friendly concordancers

1. Word Neighbors (developed by University of
   Science and Technology)
2. www.just-the-word.com
3. COCA
4. Concordance on Lextutor

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Task

• The public have expressed concern about / are
  of great concern to the public
• Sufficient / clear / strong evidence
• Improve / increase / promote efficency
• Substitute for
• Sheer ( volume / numbers / rates / amount /
  number )

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Task
20
Task

• Climate meaning weather conditions
• El Nino, a climate change associated with higher
  temperatures
• a temperate climate
• the climate of the polar regions
• A figurative meaning of climate meaning
  feelings / sentiment or trend
• a climate of fear
• Silvestrins passionately cold aesthetic should
  match the architectural climate of the 1990s
• economic climate
• election climate
• investment climate
• political climate
• the climate for negotiations

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How can corpora data be used to facilitate
vocabulary learning/teaching?

• 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 different senses (e.g. literal
  and figurative meaning) of a word
• 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)

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Other useful resources on the web

• Lexipedia (for looking up related words)
• Quizzes for ESL students
• http//a4esl.org/q/h/

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Bringing it all together

• Vocabulary (Overview)
• Word frequency lists and vocabulary size
• Mental lexicon
• Approaches to vocabulary teaching learning
• Vocabulary learning strategies
• Vocabulary assessment Corpus and concordancers
• Resources on Course Website

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Post-course reflection

1. Given what we have discussed so far about
   vocabulary learning and teaching, would you do
   anything differently next term? What would you
   keep doing?
2. Are your students encouraged to learn vocabulary
   independently? Are they trained to use any VLS?
   Are you going to integrate VLS training into your
   curriculum?

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Submission of Assignment

• Deadline October 26
• Hard copy to Cecilia
• Soft copy via www.turnitin.com

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Course Evaluation