FINAL EXAM

Subject : Academic vocabulary and corpus

Semester : IVA (4A)

Lecturer : Lina septianasari,S.S., M.Pd

Name : Endah Wahyuni

SUMMARY OF THE BOOKLET McCarten Jeanne

Lessons from the Corpus How many words are there and how many do we need to teach?
Another way of deciding the number of words learners need is to count how many different
words are used in an average spoken or written text. Despite such difficulties, researchers
have tried to estimate how many words native speakers know in order to assess the
number of words learners need to learn. Because some high-frequency words are repeated,
it is said that learners can understand a large proportion of texts with a relatively small
vocabulary.
So, for example, learners who know the most frequent 2,000 words should be able to
understand almost 80 percent of the words in an average text, and a knowledge of 5,000
words increases learners' understanding. While learning up to 5,000 words is still a
challenge, it represents a much more achievable learning goal for most learners than 20,000
words. For spoken language, the news is even better since about 1,800 words make up over
80 percent of the spoken corpus (McCarthy 2004; Teaching VocabularyO'Keeffe, McCarthy,
and Carter 2007). Second, students need to become self-sufficient learner. It is unlikely that
teachers can cover in class the huge number of vocabulary items that students will need to
use or understand, so it is equally important to help students with how to learn vocabulary
as well as with what to learn.
What can a corpus tell us about vocabulary? What is a corpus? A corpus is basically a
collection of texts which is stored in a computer. The texts can be written or spoken
language. Written texts like newspapers and magazines can be entered into the computer
from a scanner, a CD, or the Internet. Spoken texts, like conversations, are recorded and
then the recordings are transcribed; that is, they are written down word for word, so that
the texts of these conversations can be fed into the computer database. It is then possible
to analyze the language in the corpus with corpus software tools to see how people really
speak or write.
What kind of corpus do we need to use? A large corpus is often divided into sections, or
subcorpora, which contain different types of English. For example, there are subcorpora of
different varieties such as North American English and British English, or different types of
language like conversation, newspapers, business English, and academic English. To use a
corpus in designing a syllabus, the first thing to decide is what kind of English we want to
base our material on, because different corpora will give us different words and often
different uses of words to teach. For example, the word nice is in the top fifteen words in
conversation, but it is rare in written academic English, occurring mainly in quotations of
speech from literature or interviews.
Another example is the word see, which has the same frequency in conversation and
written academic English, but different uses. In conversation, see has a greater variety of
uses including the expression I see, which means "I understand," and See and You see,
which introduce what the speaker feels is new information for the listener, as in Example 1.
Lessons from the Corpus Example 1 Someone describes his relationship with his neighbors
to a stranger: You see I have neighbors that I'm good friends with, as far as neighbor-wise.
So our choice of corpus may affect which words we will include in our materials and which
meanings of those words we will teach.
For most students in general English courses, the priority is speaking, so for these
students it makes sense to base much of the syllabus on a spoken corpus. Many students
also have to write in English, especially for examinations, so again it makes sense to look at
a corpus that includes the kinds of texts students will have to write. Most of the examples in
this booklet are taken from conversations found in the North American spoken corpus,
which is part of the Cambridge International Corpus (referred to as "the Corpus" hereafter).
So what can we learn from the Corpus about vocabulary? Essentially it can tell us about
Frequency: Which words and expressions are most frequent and which are rare. Differences
in speaking and writing: Which vocabulary is more often spoken and which is more often
written. Contexts of use: The situations in which people use certain vocabulary. Collocation:
Which words are often used together. Grammatical patterns: How words and grammar
combine to form patterns. Strategic use of vocabulary: Which words and expressions are
used to organize and manage discourse.
Corpus tools help us analyze the huge amount of data in the Corpus, which can consist
of millions of words. But in addition to providing the more statistical kinds of information (a
quantitative analysis), the Corpus also gives us access to hundreds of texts which we can
read in order to observe how people use vocabulary in context - a qualitative analysis. The
Corpus, however, cannot tell us exactly what to teach or how to teach, and it has nothing to
tell us with respect to how students learn best. It cannot replace the expertise of teachers,
or of students themselves, on how best to teach and learn vocabulary.
Frequency is a list from the Corpus of the most frequently used words can give us lots of
interesting information about the spoken language (see Appendix). We can also see which
words are more common than similar or related words: Yeah is more frequent than yes;
little is more frequent than small; some plurals like things, years, kids, and children are
more frequent than the singular forms (thing, year, etc.). The list raises questions such as:
Why are the adverbs just and actually more frequent than grammatical items like doesn't?
Why is something more frequent than anything, everything, and nothing?.
How can we use this information in teaching materials? Frequency lists are useful to
help us make choices about what to teach and in what order. For example, we can see that
many idioms are rare, so we can teach them later in the language program. On the other
hand, we can see which items in a large vocabulary set (colors, types of music, clothing,
health problems, etc.) people talk about most and teach those first, leaving the less
frequent words until later. So our choice of corpus may affect which words we will include
in our materials and which meanings of those words we will teach. For example, it is
possible to see what kinds of vocabulary people use to talk about a topic like music or
celebrities, or how they repeat words, or avoid repeating words by using synonyms. For
example, a word like homework, a frequent word in any classroom, comes toward the end
of the top 2,000 words, whereas words like supposed, true, and already, which are in the
top 400, might be challenging for elementary learners.
Differences in speaking and writing is Corpus tools can give us information about how
frequent a word is in different corpora, so we can compare the frequency of vocabulary in,
say, newspapers, academic texts, and conversation.
Contexts of use : The Corpus includes information about speakers and situations in which
conversations take place. It is possible to see, for example, whether an item of vocabulary is
used by everyone in all kinds of situations, or mostly by people who know each other very
well, or mostly in more polite situations with strangers or work colleagues, etc.
Collocation : With collocation software we can search for all the collocates of a particular
word, that is, all the words that are used most frequently with that word and especially
those with a higher than anticipated frequency. They include words that come immediately
after the word (make sure) and words that come two or more words after it (make a
difference, make a huge mistake).
Grammatical pattern : The grammar of vocabulary In addition to seeing the grammar of
individual words the grammar of vocabulary we can also learn about the vocabulary used
with certain grammar structures – the vocabulary of grammar.
Strategic vocabulary : In addition to looking at single words, we can ask the Corpus to give
us frequency lists of phrases vocabulary items that contain more than one word, sometimes
called “chunks,” “lexical bundles,” or “clusters” [see McCarthy and Carter (2002); O’Keeffe,
McCarthy, and Carter (2007)].
Finding a vocabulary of conversation When we look at the most frequent words and phrases
in conversation, we find many items that conversation shares with the written language,
such as gram- matical words (articles, pronouns, prepositions, etc.), common everyday
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (people, money; go, see; different, interesting; still,
usually), and modal items (can, should, maybe, probably).
Responses These include expressions to show agreement (Exactly, Absolutely, That’s true);
expressions to show understanding (I know, I know what you mean, I see); reactions to
good or bad news (Great!, That’s nice, That’s too bad), or expressions which simply show
the listener is still listening and participating in the conversation (Uh huh, Mmm, Yeah,
Huh).
Teaching strategic vocabulary: Fundamentals for a syllabus
By categorizing the types of expressions and observing the kinds of strategies that
speakers in the Corpus use to manage and conduct conversations, it is possible to construct
a conversation syllabus that includes this vocabulary of conversation. Practicing this kind of
vocabulary use can make students not only sound more natural and fluent, but helps them
to learn and exploit vocabulary skills of using synonyms and opposites, instead of just
making lists of synonyms and opposites which they may never actually use.
 We have seen that learning vocabulary is a challenge for learners, partly because of the
size of the task, and partly because of the variety of vocabulary types to be learned,
including single words, phrases, collocations, and strategic vocabulary, as well as
grammatical patterning, idioms, and fixed expressions. For example, we can focus
occasionally on how to express opposite or similar meanings for a set of vocabulary we are
teaching, show students what is useful to learn about the forms of nouns or verbs, or how
prefixes and suf- fixes can help build vocabulary knowledge quickly. Giving students practice
in manipulating these different areas of knowledge teaches useful learning strategies they
can apply to learning other vocabulary.
We should also encourage students to look at learning the various meanings of an item
of vocabulary as a gradual, incremental process, and show them how they can come back to
a word they have previously “learned” to add more information about it, such as other
meanings, or how to create an opposite meaning using a prefix. When you assign
vocabulary lists to learn, why not include some passive vocabulary items and discuss with
students which items they need to learn “for understanding” and which they need to learn
really well so that they can use them.
Additionally, even from the elementary level, it is important to include in vocabulary
lessons not just single words, but also larger “chunks” such as collocations, phrases, or
expressions, even whole sentences, as well as strategic vocabulary [see Sökmen (1997)].
As we said earlier, there is a lot to learn about vocabulary in terms of its range, the
sheer number of words and phrases to learn, and the depth of knowledge students need to
know about each vocabulary item. One of the first vocabulary learning strategies for any
classroom is how to ask for words you don’t know in English, and how to ask the meaning of
English words you don’t understand, so phrases like “What’s the word for Learning
vocabulary is largely about remembering, and students generally need to see, say, and write
newly learned words many times before they can be said to have learned them. Some
suggest that an impressive amount of learning can take place when students learn lists of
paired items (English word and translation equivalents); others suggest that this method of
learning does not aid deeper understanding of the words or help develop fluency.
However, most agree that repetition is an important aid to learning and that having to
actively recall or “retrieve” a word is a more effective way of learning than simple exposure
or just seeing a word over and over (Sökmen 1997). Another area of research is how long
students can remember words after first learning them, and again researchers agree that
forgetting mostly occurs immediately after we first learn something, and that the rate of
forgetting slows down afterward [see Gu (2003)].
The implications for the vocabulary classroom are self-evident: Review vocabulary as
often as possible in activities that have students actively recall words and produce them
rather than merely see or hear them. In a large study of vocabulary learning strategies used
by students at different ages, Schmitt (1997) reports that younger (junior high school)
students found that personalization was less helpful to them than the older students in
university and adult classes. Another important point is not to overload students – there are
limits to how much vocabulary anyone can absorb for productive use in one lesson and this
will be affected by how “difficult” the words are and how much students are required to
know about them [on the notion of difficulty, see Laufer (1997)].
Since the classroom may be the main or only place that students hear or use English, it’s
important to include in lessons the strategic vocabulary we identified in Part, as it makes up
so much of spoken vocabulary. Teachers can support these “conversations” by teaching the
types of strategic vocabulary identified, in order to help students manage their own talk,
relate to other students, respond, and manage the conversation as a whole. A lot of
vocabulary learning research points to the relative success of learners who are
independent, devote time to self-study, use a variety of learning strate- gies, and keep good
vocabulary notes.
As Gu (2003) summarizes his own and other studies, “Good learners seem to be those
who initiate their own learning, selectively attend to words of their own choice, studiously
try to remember these words, and seek opportunities to use them.” We can help students
be better learners and acquire good learning habits by setting structured learning tasks that
can be done out of class. Very often students’ own vocabulary note-taking consists only of
writing translations of single words in lists, but it can be much more varied than this,
including labeling pictures and diagrams, completing charts and word webs, writing true
sentences, creating short dialogues, etc.
Since there are so many things to learn about each piece of vocabulary (meaning,
spoken/written forms, collocations, connotations, gram- matical behavior, etc.) it is
important that we as teachers only introduce a little at a time, starting with the most
frequent, useful, and learnable vocabulary, and returning later to more difficult vocabulary
and less frequent uses of previously learned items. We need to repeat vocabulary often,
because students must work with a word or phrase many times before acquisition takes
place, and we must offer variety to keep the exercises fresh and to cater to different
learning styles.