Trabalho de Projecto apresentado para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Didáctica Do Inglês realizado sob a orientação
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APPENDIX B
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CORPUS-BASED EXERCISES - HANDOUTS
1
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this research paper is to analyze how corpus-based exercises can help students in Portuguese secondary school to understand better the foreign language they are learning and at the same time to analyse if these types of exercises can improve the students’ learning in terms of vocabulary and understanding of the structures learned. It also aims to find out if corpus-based exercises can contribute to students’ motivation during the lesson.
2 2000: 55), i.e. something that can be caused “by outside factors like “the need to pass an exam or the hope of financial reward”(Harmer 2007: 51). To sum up, the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is nothing but the motivation that “comes from the inside and outside” respectively (Harmer 2007: 51). If a student is motivated enough, even when he/she has difficulties, he/she will try to do the best to overcome them.
In order to write this research paper, a small scale action research was carried out during the months of November and December. During these months I prepared some corpus-based exercises and tried them out initially with two classes of a vocational school in Paço de Arcos, Portugal, and then in another class from a private institute called Skillsgym, which provides languages and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) classes all over the country. In this case, the classes were held in a school in Odivelas. The exercises that were prepared were used to find out if corpus-based exercises could and can contribute to increase students’ learning and understanding.
This paper begins with some general information regarding corpora, focusing on a definition of corpus and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of corpora. Corpora seem to have been discovered by teachers only recently, but are not very well-known because they are not part of current mainstream teaching training programmes (Granath: 2009). According to Aijmer (2009:1), “teachers are still unwilling to or lack the skill to use corpora as an aid to get new insights into English”, and for Gabrielatos (2005: 00) “few teachers are clear about the nature of corpora, or their significance for language teaching, and fewer still have even made direct use of corpora.” In fact, there seems to be very little information on corpora in Portugal. I have even questioned some present and former colleagues about corpora and none of them had ever heard of them before. Personally I could have been included in this group a year ago, since I have only heard about them when I started the Masters in “Didáctida do Inglês”. At the time I remember commenting with the other Master students that corpora were something totally new to us, since neither of us or our colleagues at the school had ever heard or used corpora before. I truly believe that a vast majority of teachers doesn’t know in fact, what corpora are and how they can be used in a classroom. As far as I am concerned, corpora are not part of teacher training and are not taught or they are seldom mentioned in universities in Portugal.
3 dramatically” (Kindt&Wright 2001: 1) but some believe that it seems “there might be a clash between the corpus linguist's enthusiasm about the language-pedagogical use of corpora on the one hand and the average teacher's reluctance to use corpora in his/her own classroom on the other.” (Mukherjee 2004:7)
Despite the possibility of an existing clash between the ones who defend and are great enthusiasts of corpora in the classroom and the ones who are unprepared to use them, I still believe that most teachers in Portugal don’t use them because they don’t know what corpora are. They are not aware that they can have the opportunity to use corpora in their lessons and above all they are not conscious about the advantages that corpus-based exercises can bring into the classrooms, especially for non-native teachers as it can be used as a reference tool.
It is not surprising, then, that as far as the use of corpora in language teaching in Portugal is concerned, there seems to be very little or practically no research on this topic when it comes to secondary education. For this reason, I decided to carry out this project work. Since it deals with two different samples of students with two different realities, both in terms of school, age range, nationality and in terms of school perspectives, some interesting conclusions can be drawn.
Although there seems to be very little or no research as far as the use of corpora in secondary schools is concerned, there have been studies involving the use of corpora by university students who are learning English as part of their training syllabus. Frankenberg-Garcia (2007) reports on research using parallel concordances with university students. Parallel concordances are “concordances from corpora which contain texts in one language aligned with their translations into one or more languages” (Frankenberg-Garcia 2005: 190). They can be useful because they allow students to compare their native language to the language they are learning, enabling them to realize that there are some nuances and varieties of the language that otherwise would be very difficult to understand as students are not native speakers and lack many expressions that the native speakers may use. By using such a corpus, students can also correct the preconceived ideas they could possibly have. In another study, Frankenberg-Garcia (2012a) describes corpus-based exercises used in translation classes at a Portuguese university.
4 Simões and Santos (2011) have also used Portuguese language corpora with foreign students learning Portuguese as a foreign language at university.
5
CHAPTER I: REASONS FOR WRITING THE PROJECT
In the past years I have been having the opportunity to teach in different schools in the area of Lisbon. For this reason I have had the chance to meet many different types of students from different social backgrounds, with different likes and dislikes, different attitudes towards the English language and different levels of language aptitude and proficiency. Besides that, each student also has his/her unique personality, which can influence his/her attitude towards the lessons. These aspects have been of great interest to me since “the teacher’s task is overwhelmingly complex [because] we want to satisfy the many different students in front of us, teaching to their individual strengths with activities designed to produce the best results of each of them, yet we also want to address our teaching to the group as a whole” (Harmer 2007:48). Although ideally a teacher should always teach bearing in mind each student and his/her profile as a learner, realistically that is impossible. It is impossible due to the number of students each teacher has in the class and due to impositions by the Ministry of Education and school directives that require teachers to follow a specific syllabus and to teach specific contents. It would be significantly more productive and more challenging if a teacher could have time to get to know each student individually and then be able to draw on his/her strengths so that he/she could have the best results possible. However, we know that this is not possible so teachers have to work the best way they know and using the resources they have at their disposal.
It is also very complicated to have heterogeneous classes, where there are some students who are very good and understand what is being asked and taught, and some students that don’t understand what is going on in the class and who have many difficulties in understanding the English language. In fact, I really believe that this situation happens most of the time in Portuguese schools. Even when there are good classes and good students, there are always some of them that show many difficulties in learning and understanding the language.
7
CHAPTER II: DEFINITION OF CORPORA
8 Fig. 1 –Example of a key word in context in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) [http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/]
The screenshot in figure 1 represents a concordance, which Frankenberg-Garcia (2005: 189) defines as a “list of occurrences of a given word, part of a word or combinations of words, together with their contexts, within a corpus of text.” Similarly, McCarthy defines it as “a screen display or printout of a chosen word or phrase in its different contexts, with that word or phrase arranged down the center of the display along with the text that comes before and after.” (2004:12)
In figure 2, we have some concordances for the word exam. Through this example one can notice that the word exam co-occurs with words related to health (like medical exam or rape exam) and related to education (final exam or entrance exam).
Figure 2 – COCA concordances for the word exam
They take Aislinn for a medical exam. The nurse reports she observes no acute injuries. that she would need to pass the state exam -- found in the dumpster of the apartment complex. pulled overnighters with her roommate during exam periods. Never one to proclaim her views loudly, Tomorrow is our final exam. I want the lily, can't you understand that?
She sat on the exam table in a blue paper gown, a plastic tie knotted My alarm clock didn't go off, so I walked into an exam late. I tried to be quiet, but as I was sitting down,
Ms. Rice said, " will not be allowed to sit for the exam.' Students will also have to certify their identity in writing My alarm clock didn't go off, so I walked into an exam late. I tried to be quiet, but as I was sitting down,
for a comprehensive eye exam. During the exam, the doctor discovered that there was an issue with the Test of English as a Foreign Language exam. One of the most exuberant experiences in their
9 In addition to key words in context, it is also possible to find out information regarding collocations, lexical bundles and nuances of language.
According to Bennet (2010:8), a collocation is “the statistical tendency of words to co-occur. This means that when one word is used, there is a high statistical probability that a certain word or words will occur alongside it.” To McCarthy (2004: 12) a collocation “examines the likelihood that two words will occur together.” For example it is highly probable that the word blond occurs with the word hair and not with the word jacket. Figure 3 shows a screenshot of a collocation for the word blond.
Figure 3- COCA collocation for the word blond
Bennet (2010) also mentions that corpora are very useful to find lexical bundles which she defines as a recurring sequence of three or more words. She also mentions that corpora can be very helpful about the small nuances of language because they can answer to questions that we are not able to answer or simply don’t know how to answer since we are not native speakers.
10 most often” (McCarthy 2004: 10) Figure 4 shows us the British National Corpus (BNC) frequency list for all words present in the corpus.
Figure 4 – BNC frequency list (available at http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/bncfreq/lists/2_3_writtenspoken.txt)
The use of corpora in language learning is not new. According to Bennet (2010:2), the principles of corpus linguistics have existed for almost a century, since lexicographers and dictionary makers have been collecting examples of “language in use to help accurately define words.” The advent and subsequent widespread of computers as well as of sophisticated software have allowed the development of corpora, and the first electronic corpus used to study language was the Brown Corpus, created in 1961 (cf. Bennet 2010 and Granath 2009). Thus corpora as we know them, have been available for more than 40 years and have been used successfully in other areas. Mukherjee (2004: 7) states that
“the earliest and most significant impact that Corpus Linguistics had on language teaching can
be found in lexicography. The compilation of the Collins Birmingham University International Language
Database in the 80’s let to the first corpus based dictionary, the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary based on a corpus of a million word.”
11 Their acceptance in terms of language teaching has only happened in the past few years and now corpora are seen as a useful tool that are used more and more often. (cf. Sinclair 2004:1) It seems that “Corpora (…) have entered the classroom from the backdoor” (Bernardini 2004:15) and only in the last 10 years teachers and applied linguists have become more and more interested in the corpus linguistics approach, that is why their pedagogical value was recently acknowledged. Though Nesselhauf thinks that corpora haven’t been properly explored, (2004:1), some believe that corpora have changed our perception on how to use the language. However there also seems to be that there “still remains a wide gap between the wide range of corpus-based activities that have been suggested by applied corpus linguists and the relatively limited extent to which corpora are actually used in the ELT classroom” (Mukherjee 2004:6). That is why that it tends to be impossible to know how they are being used in the classroom (Aijmer:2009) and I can add that it is impossible to know if they are even being used at all. Even if some teachers know about them, I truly believe that they accommodate to what they have to do at school and don’t make an effort to use new strategies which can be a source of motivation in the classroom.
Nevertheless there is no doubt that corpora have been used more and more in language learning in the past few years. This ‘collection of authentic texts’ have achieved great importance because it means that the information that teachers can take from corpora is not invented. On the contrary. The language of corpora consists of real samples of language. These authentic written or spoken corpora can “show us how language is used in real life and in many different contexts” (McCarthy 2004:1) and they also give us “a detailed view of how real people speak and write in everyday situations” (McCarthy 2004:6). Therefore, corpus-based materials can be “genuinely special [because] they are based on actual usage [and the sentences that one can use] although they may sometimes be edited or adapted, are a reflection of real usage; they are not invented” (McCarthy 2004: 15). That is also why corpora is said to help people “to see how language is used in contemporary society, how [the] use of language has changed over time, and how language is used in different situations” (McCarthy 2004:1). Through the use of corpus-based exercises, teachers “are freed from relying entirely on intuition and are able to find explanations that fit the evidence” (Kindt & Wright 2001: 3).
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“teachers and learners can be sure that the language they are practicing is modern, used in everyday situations that are likely to find themselves in, and corresponds to what they will hear and see in real conversations, movies, radio and TV shows, newspapers, books, Internet texts and magazines. It is
not artificial or invented language, but consists of the most widely used words, phrases, and grammar…”
(McCarthy 2004: 17)
In a study carried out by Chambers in 2005, a student refers to corpora as “authentic, up to date and relevant” This study was carried out with second year students that received training in the use of software and were also guided on corpus consultation and analysis (Chambers 2005:00). In general the students “appreciate the access to a large numbers of examples and to language use” (ibid).
Besides that, corpora can also be used “to boost incidental learning, to promote learner autonomy and to create customized exercises for specific group of learners on the fly, as the need arises” (Frankenberg-Garcia 2012b:45) and to “respond to [the] learner’s specific needs (ibid p:37). This means that through corpus-based exercises students can deduce language patterns trough the examples they analyse. This opportunity will develop students’ autonomy. On the other hand, and at the same time teachers can also create specific exercises according to their students’ needs, difficulties or profiles.
Corpora can also offer a “view of language structure that has not been available before” (Sinclair 2004:1) and “provides a more objective view of language than that of introspection, intuition and anecdotes” (Krieger 2003:00). This means that through corpora teachers and students have access to real source which allows them not to rely on their intuition only.
13 new ways of seeing the language and above all, they are able to find out how native speakers normally speak. It is an “approach to learning from corpora in which learners are guided to browse large and varied texts collections in open-ended, exploratory ways” (Bernardini 2004:22).
These exploratory ways where learners are encouraged to think by themselves and to discover the nuances of language can be referred to as Data-Driven Learning (DDL), a term coined by late Professor Tim Johns in the late eighties in the course of his classes in the English for International Students Unit at the University of Birmingham (cf. Römer 2008). In this sense, students are encouraged to explore the language and try to detect specific patterns in it. They should also be “in the centre of the process, taking increased responsibility for their own learning rather than being taught rules in a more passive mode” (Boulton 2009: 82) because it has also been observed that “learners’ observations are more accurate and complete than traditional grammar rules.” (Boulton 2009: 84) This way, learners can become researchers where “instead of having to rely on the researcher as a mediator and provider of corpus-based materials, (…) [they can] get their hands on corpora and concordances themselves and find out about language patterning and the behaviour of words and phrases in an autonomous way” (Bernardini 2002:165)
On the other hand, it is also true that a corpus cannot explain why the answer is right or wrong or even not possible. It only manages to say what is or is not present in the language (Bennet 2010:3). In fact a “corpus may not provide a definition for an unfamiliar item or sense, (…) [however] it can give a much better idea of usage, including the extent to which usage habitually varies (Aston 1998:00). Although a corpus is not able to provide a definition, on the other hand it presents “the attempt to compile a database that provides a statically viable sample of language use in general” (Mukherjee 2004:5) and “provides opportunities for substantial amounts of targeted practice on selected items which otherwise would only be met on occasion or through invented and impoverished contexts” (Boulton 2009:84).
14 classroom and “they are no replacement for natural communication” ( Johansson 2009: 42). At the same time, “a corpus containing authentic native language data may include samples of grammatically incorrect usage” (Ebeling 2009:75), since native speakers using the language naturally make mistakes and may not use the standard we want our students to learn.
How should teachers then, use a corpus? Gabrielatos (2005) mentions that there are two ways of using corpora in language teaching: the soft and the hard version. He defines the soft version as the one where only the teacher has access to while the hard version requires a direct access from learners to computer and corpus facilities. The soft version can also be manipulated by the teacher since the he/she can decide beforehand which corpus extracts are going to be used in class. If opting for this method, it is also possible for a teacher to adapt the corpus extracts used or pre-select the ones that are related to the topic that it is being studied.
Alex Boulton uses the expressions hands-on and hand-off approach (cf. Boulton 2010b) to define the same thing. A hands-on approach is the one where students have direct access to corpora and use them to learn by themselves and to answer the questions they might have, as opposed to the hands-off approach, which implies that the teacher is the one who has direct access to corpora, and can select and manipulate the examples he/she thinks are the most adequate and use them according to his/her purposes.
If teachers decide to adopt a “hand-on” approach, they also must have in mind that they need computers and adequate software for students. They also need to guide students and teach them how to use and carry out queries in corpora. These two aspects can be a disadvantage in terms of using corpora in the classroom. Johansson (2009:42) goes further and claims that teachers “should not be using [corpora] in language teaching just because we now have this wonderful tool and would like to apply it in language teaching as well.”
On the other hand, if teachers decide to use the “hands-off” approach, they also need to spend much time developing the materials because “there are no ‘ready-made’ ones” (Saeed & Waly 2009:4). Moreover “they also need to make the activities suitable for their students’ proficiency level and culture” (Saeed & Waly 2009: 4).
15 comparable and monitor, although she focuses more on the first four which are also the ones more relevant to this paper. General corpora are usually very large and “seek to give users as much of a whole picture of a language as possible” (Bennet 2010:13). Two examples of this type of corpora are the British National Corpus (BNC)1 and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)2.
In contrast, specialized corpora contain texts of a certain type and want to be representative of the language of this type, like the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE)3, which contain transcripts of academic speech events recorded at the University of Michigan. This corpus contains data from a wide range of speech events like lectures, classroom discussions, lab sections, seminars, and advising sessions.
Learner corpora, as their name indicates, contain written texts and/or spoken transcripts of language used by students who are currently acquiring the language and finally, pedagogic corpora contain language that is used in the classroom, i.e. language that is related to the educational context.
Sylviane Granger (2009) refers that corpora can be divided into two categories: corpora for delayed pedagogical use (DPU) and corpora for immediate pedagogical use (IPU). The former is compiled by academics as a way of illustrating a specific language and the latter collected by teachers as part of the classroom daily activity where students are at the same time producers of the corpus data.
Although there are several types of corpora, collected for different reasons, all of them can and are possible to be used for educational purposes as they can add great contributions in the language teaching process.
1
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/corpus/index.xml
2
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
3
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CHAPTER III: THE APPROACH
This research was carried using corpora via the “hands-off” approach or the “soft version”. In other words, instead of having the learners use computers directly I accessed online corpus (BNC and COCA) and selected the structures that I thought would be more adequate for the type of students I had in class. This was the best option having in mind the target population and the facilities that were available. First of all it was impossible to have a computer for each student during the English class. It would also be very difficult to get the students to access corpora directly since some of them show many difficulties in understanding the English language. More details about the students are going to be given further on. Therefore, to place them in front of a computer and ask them to do a research where they would encounter vocabulary that they don’t know and don’t understand would not have been of great advantage. Moreover, “printed materials are likely to be more accessible for immediate use by regular teachers and learners in ordinary classroom situations” and “paper-based materials also provide something tangible for students to take away and consult at a later date.” (Boulton 2010a:27) They are also useful because there is “no need for a computer laboratory, computers that go wrong, websites that crash[and]unexpected findings”. (Boulton 2008:39)
Besides that, I also had a limited number of lessons where I could try the corpus-based exercises because students should mandatorily study the topics that the syllabus covered. For this reason I tried to complement the topics that students were studying at that moment with corpus-based exercises and also have in mind that I had a limited number of lessons to follow.
17 complemented the students’ course book because they “sometimes offer few exercises or lack interesting, authentic materials” (Aijmer 2009:5).
Initially, the target population of the study were the students from a vocational school, Instituto de Tecnologias Náuticas, located in Paço de Arcos. However, when classes started in September I realized that the students in both classes that were assigned to me presented many difficulties in terms of usage and understanding the English language, either in terms of speaking, listening or writing. Therefore I decided to broaden my study and also use corpus-based materials with one class that I taught on Saturdays. Although this class was part of a private training school, its students attend state school and all of them are really motivated in the English class and their main objective was to learn the English language, that is why they were taking an extra-curricular private language course.
Thus, this research was carried out in three different classes: two classes from the vocational school and one class from a private teaching centre.
The corpus- based exercises that were tried out with the classes were all taken from the British National Corpus (BNC) and from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The BNC is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language that is designed to be representative of British English, either spoken or written. 90% of the written part comes from “extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text.”4
10% of this corpus consists of transcriptions of unscripted informal conversations and spoken language collected in different contexts.
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is the largest freely-available corpus of English and contains more than 450 million words of text. It is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts and it is regularly updated.5
I chose these two corpora because they are the ones that I know the best. Besides that they are both free and were the ones which were used during my MA seminar.
4
cf: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/corpus/index.xml 5
19 III. 1. CHARACTERIZATION OF THE TARGET POPULATION
1.1. Classes from Instituto de Tecnologias Náuticas (ITN)
As I have already stated above, initially the study was going to be carried out using two classes from a vocational school in Paço de Arcos. Vocational schools in Portugal provide vocational courses which are much more related with and oriented to the professional world. Usually students that choose these courses don’t want to carry on to university since the main objective of these courses is to value and provide students with tools to work. The courses value above all the skills to learn a job, therefore, students are trained to the world of work. These schools contrast with regular schools where students are trained to continue their studies and enter university.
The two classes in the vocational school have some particularities in common. They are both bigger than usual, with approximately 21 students each, when normally this type of class has around 14-16 students. Both classes also have a very high percentage of immigrant students from the Guinea or Cape Verde, and a very low ratio of Portuguese students. In one of the classes there is only one Portuguese student, while in the other there are five. The students’ mother tongue is Creole, either from Cape Verde or from the Guinea.
One of the classes is studying to become “Técnicos de Energias Renováveis” (TER11) or Renewable Energies Technicians. It is composed of 20 students who are from 16 to 23 years old. It is a very heterogeneous class since it encompasses a very wide age range as well as a wide range in terms of knowledge and experience with the English language. It is a class which has only one girl and the great majority shows many difficulties both in the Portuguese and the English language. The majority of the students has had contact with the English language for the first time one year ago in Portugal when they came here to study the first year of the vocational course, which is equivalent to the 10th grade.
20 class of 20 students, only 5 of them are able to keep up a conversation in English and reveal understanding when it comes to listening and reading activities.
These students were given a questionnaire in January where they were asked about their opinions towards the English language and their feelings in the English class. This information gives us some background relating to their profile as learners and their beliefs as far as the foreign language is concerned.
At the time the questionnaire (see appendix A) was given, there were only 17 students because three of them were absent so we don’t have access to the opinions of the whole class. Nonetheless, the students’ responses were all very similar. All of them agree that the English language is very important to talk to people all over the world, to watch films and listen to music, to find or get a better job and to travel. Only a minority of them is not very sure if English is important to watch films and listen to music and only one student believes that English is not necessary when it comes to watching films. The questionnaire also encompassed a question regarding the motives why they are learning English. Some of them acknowledged that they are studying this language because it is part of the syllabus, therefore it is the language that they have to learn. On the other hand, they also consider that they are learning it so that they are able to speak to people all around the world, since English is an international language of communication. Some of them mention that English is a very important language, either for their future or for working and travelling.
The students were also asked about their feelings during the English lessons. As far as the classroom atmosphere is concerned, most of them feel comfortable during the lessons, as well as confident and participative. Most of them seldom or never feel that they are uncomfortable or insecure and don’t depict themselves as shy or bored in class. The majority is always or sometimes confident and excited. Only two students confess that they are always shy and three of them mention they are never excited during the lesson.
So this questionnaire proved to be very useful as it provides us relevant information regarding the students’ personal characteristics. It is important to know that most of these students don’t seem to have any kind of animosity towards the English lesson and, on the contrary, they feel themselves very well and confident during the lesson and consider themselves as participative and excited students.
21 21 students aged between 18 and 21 years old although only 16 answered the questionnaire because the remaining 5 were absent. There is a Portuguese student in this class and the great majority of them come from the Guinea and are in Portugal just to take this vocational course and intend to return to their country afterwards. Thus most of them have had contact with the English language for the first time in the first year of this course.
They were given the same questionnaire as the previous class and were also asked about their opinions concerning the English language and about their attitudes and feelings towards the lesson itself. Similarly to what had happened to class TER11, this class also mentioned that the English language is essential to communicate with people from all over the world, to watch films and listen to music, to find a better job and to travel abroad.
They are only learning English because it is part of their course syllabus but some of them admit that they like this language and therefore they want to improve it. Some students consider this language as an important language in the world and some acknowledge that it is important to communicate with people from all over the world.
Although these students present severe difficulties in English, they all admit that they are most of the time very comfortable, participative and confident during the English lesson. None of them mentioned that he/she feels uncomfortable and contrary to what had happened to TER11, most of them admitted that they feel insecure, probably because they haven’t had much contact with the English language before. There are also 5 students that mention that they feel only sometimes insecure and one of them that confesses that he/she always feels insecure. 5 of these students admit that they are always excited against 5 of them that are only sometimes, whereas 2 are never excited.
22 1.2. Class from the private school
This class was composed of 6 students (girls) although only 5 answered the questionnaire because one of them was absent. Their age range varies from 13 to 16 years old and they were all studying in the state school and on Saturdays they were taking an English course in a private school. They were preparing themselves to take the Preliminary English Test from Cambridge English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). For this reason, all of them were taking these lessons because they wanted to learn and/or improve their English language abilities.
Most of these students started learning English at school, while they were in the 4th or 5th grades, therefore most of them have been studying English for 3, 5 or 6 years, depending on their age. Most of them stated that the English language is very important to communicate with people all over the world, to listen to music, to travel and to get a better job.
Besides being part of the syllabus at school, these students are learning English because they like learning this language and because they want to learn it or improve it. One of them mentioned that it is important to learn it because of her future career and another one thinks it is going to be necessary in her future.
These students were also questioned about their attitudes and feelings in this specific English class. The results were quite positive in terms of students profile as most of them always feel comfortable in the class and seldom or never feel uncomfortable or bored. Three of them mentioned that they are rarely or never shy while two of them are sometimes shy in the lesson. As far as insecurity is concerned, the results are very similar. Most of them never or rarely feel insecure while two of them only sometimes feel insecure in the lesson. Two of the students are always excited while the others only experience sometimes this feeling. As far as the confidence and active participation are concerned, the results are very alike. Two students acknowledge that they are always confident and participative while the other three say that this happens only sometimes.
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III. 2. CORPUS-BASED EXERCISES
Despite the students’ personal characteristics that obviously can influence the learning of a language, there is also an important aspect that must be taken in consideration. One must not forget that most of the students from the two classes from the vocational school lack the basic knowledge of the English language. From the beginning, this proved to be a very big problem. Most of the students don’t understand what they read or listen, therefore they are not also able to express themselves in English. For this reason, I tried to create a corpus-based exercise that would provide them with some structures and vocabulary and eventually lead them to speak about the topic that was being studied and which was related to the Internet and their use of it . Therefore, in October, I managed to put in practice the first corpus-based exercise.
This exercise, as above stated, was related to the topic “Internet”. It was put in practice with both classes from the vocational school, TER11 and TAN 11. Hence I carried out a query in COCA and BNC. I carried out concordance searches for the phrase The Internet and selected from the results extracts the ones that I thought would be very simple, with easy and accessible vocabulary. Figure 5 shows raw concordances for the word Internet and also shows the level difficulty of some of the vocabulary, which explains my decision to simplify the sentences.
25 Some of these sentences include vocabulary which is very difficult for students like ‘Paths between communicating endpoints in theInternet are typically made up of many hops with links of different rates or bandwidths;” (second sentence from figure 5) If students were shown sentences such as these, they wouldn’t understand them due to complex words like ‘endpoint’, ‘hops’, ‘bandwiths’ or even ‘paths’. However, the first sentence ‘Congestion is an old problem on the Internet, appearing in various forms with different symptoms and causing major problems’ could be adapted to students and could become ‘an old problem on the Internet.’This way, students could notice that the preposition used with the Internet is ‘on’ and not ‘at’ or ‘in’.
26 Figure 6 –Exercise related to “The Internet”
1- Read the sentences taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
computers that were connected to the Internet. / that also connect to the Internet. And with the entire world connected through the Internet
writing papers or assignments, and accessing information on the Internet.
access the Internet and the Worldwide Web, / would not let me access the Internet /access the Internet; and watch movies.
The following year, time spent on the Internet.
the experiences of students who use the Internet more frequently /He uses the Internet at his local library.
The number of students addicted to the Internet.
The survey questionnaire was delivered through the Internet.
The teacher could ask students to check the internet for the meanings of English words. other hardware that help run the Internet and other network and communication systems. in an electronic age that allows the world to watch in real time via the Internet.
I printed a copy of your recommended food recipe from the Internet. Software programs downloaded from the Internet.
debates all over the Internet. without the help of the Internet.
2- Which verbs and prepositions can be used with the word Internet?
Verb Preposition
__________________________ ____________________ __________________________ ____________________ __________________________ ____________________ __________________________ ____________________ __________________________ ____________________ __________________________ ____________________ __________________________ ____________________
27 structures that I wanted them to. Some of them don’t know what the difference between of preposition and verbs is. As their mother tongue is Creole they also show many difficulties in Portuguese and although I had explained the concepts in Portuguese some of them didn’t understand what they were meant to do. Moreover, these students also lack some basic knowledge in terms of general knowledge.
After doing this exercise, the students were also asked to do a gap-filling exercise (figure 7) which they had to complete bearing in mind the vocabulary and expressions that were taken from the previous exercise as a way of consolidating what they had been led to notice before. As I stated above, I also took the sentences for this exercise from the COCA and the BNC. I realized that once I was trying to test corpora and their effectiveness in class, I would also have to have authentic sentences, instead of having the usual ones taken from a course book or invented by me. This way, students could try to “detect patterns of usage, collocations, colligation, morphology, and so on. It [could] sensitize [them] to issues of frequency and typically, register and text type, discourse and style, as well as the fuzzy nature of language itself.” (Boulton: 2009:83). Then through these sentences students can detect which words can co-occur together (collocation) and can also infer the grammatical company that some words require (colligation). On the other hand “EFL students are unlikely to be motivated by a language learning activity if the instances of language use that they are studying are taken from contexts which make no connection with their interests and concerns” (Tribble 1997:00)
Figure 7- Exercise with vocabulary related to the Internet 4- Based on the examples from exercise 1, fill in the blanks.
1. WordPerfect documents were sent _________________ the Internet and arrived within five minutes! 2. What sort of information can be found ______________ the Internet?
3. In fact it has been available __________the Internet for years.
4. But if you let the brain constantly be inundated with ideas ____________the Internet and television 5. Just say you have no _______________ the Internet.
6. 74 percent of all Americans ___________the Internet.
28 8. Students who have physical access to and _______________ the Internet at home.
9. That can be downloaded ________________ the Internet for free and without individual agreement. 10. Others contacted by telephone and __________ the Internet.
11. One in which the population can get news _____________ the Internet. 12. The school's computers have no ________________ the Internet. 13. I went to the computer to ____________ the Internet.
14. 20 percent of the population in Egypt has ____________ the Internet. 15. A lot of people get their stuff ________________the Internet now.
While doing this specific activity, I was able to see that, even the students that had showed some difficulties in the previous exercise, managed to complete the sentences using the expressions from the previous one and using my help only by translating and calling their attention to some particular expressions.
During these two activities I could observe the TER11 students’ behaviour. I concluded that some students that aren’t usually very engaged or interested in the English lesson, were working and showed themselves very engaged. However, I cannot state that the students were more engaged because of the type of exercise or, on the other hand, they were more engaged because they understood better what they had to do with the exercises.
One of my main objectives with this exercise was also to supply students with some vocabulary that they could use afterwards when speaking or writing about their personal relation with the Internet. I was very pleased to find out that some students were capable of reproducing some of the sentences when they were asked about their habits as Internet users. They were able to reproduce expressions as “I use the Internet”, I “access the Internet”or “I spend ... hours on the Internet”. Although these may seem very simple expressions for a proficient user of English, I believe that for these specific students it was a very important step given their very low proficiency.
29 As far as the first exercise is concerned, similarly to what had happened with the other class (TER 11), these students had many difficulties in understanding what was being asked. Either because they are not used to noticing patterns of usage by themselves or because they also lack knowledge on the basic definitions of a language that is not their mother tongue. I had to repeat the instructions in Portuguese several times and give an example first and from then on, after having realized what they were supposed to do, they managed to complete these specific exercise and the others in a very simple way.
When the students completed the handout, I asked them directly what their opinion about that new type of exercises was. They stated that they had been easier to do and also mentioned that through that way they were able to memorize the vocabulary better. They were also able to reproduce orally some of the structures when I asked them to complete a sentence from the exercise and this shows that they were in fact able to memorize vocabulary.
After this, they were asked to write some sentences. They were asked to use specifically some of this vocabulary. They were capable of accomplishing this task as well as capable of expressing themselves in English. The most striking fact was that weaker students that never used to express themselves in English, were able to speak basing themselves on the corpus examples they had seen.
As I was really committed to finding out the real extent or influence of these exercises on the students, next class I asked them to talk about themselves and their experience with the Internet. They had to use the expressions from the previous lesson and couldn’t use the handout to do so. In fact, the students still remembered the vocabulary and the structures and were able to use them orally.
30 Figure 8 – Corpus-based exercise with the phrasal verbs
Read the sentences. Match each phrasal verb with its meaning.
Set forth
_____________________
we need to setforth a program…
they setforth a number of initiatives to help those who spend time on
the water.
the Protocol applies only to those procedural acts set forth in Article 2(a) of the Convention.
…and included issues which were set forth in four documents.
Set about
______________________
So we setabout painting.
…so Christopher and I setabout building the Honest Company.
I setabout preparing for my departure to tropical climes.
When he came out of prison he set about rebuilding his life.
Set off
______________________
Maureen and Aubrey were about to set off on a round-Britain
motoring holiday.
Together they setoff down the beach.
He setoff from San Francisco in 1875.
She set off for the second floor, but there was no police officer there.
Set out
______________________
He made us tea and setout some grapes.
They had a picnic by the river where there was a jetty and rustic tables
and chairs set out.
Jack Bleriot came over to help us setout the roses.
I've prepared your bed, brought up fresh water, and setout your
nightclothes for Annie.
…and then setout the usual weekday breakfast for Claire and Kate --
fruit, cereal...
Set up
_____________________
In the past year it has set up outlets in Singapore and Taiwan.
The Progressive Policy Institute was set up by the Democratic
Leadership Council.
During her years as team manager she had set up a good system for
running the team.
It has also setup an eBay store.
Take away
_______________________
…when the French began to take away the liberty of other
countries…
Money doesn't take away the problems of the world.
But the government wants to take away my son also.
Then you have a drug to take away the pain.
Take in
_______________________
He is handsome enough to take inany silly young girl!’
They takein these innocent children and beat all the creativity and
free will out of them.
She tried to pass this off as an amusing story, but nobody was taken
in.
Take off
But sales will not really take off until they become a standard
quality-control feature on production lines.
In College Park, homes in the historic district also havetakenoff. And while home prices in the city are up only slightly.
31
_______________________ The sale of high-value detached houses appears to havetakenoff in recent months.
Our exports of those things havetakenoff in the past five years.
Take on
_______________________
In the late 1950s, however, his Office was still very small and not
equipped to take on the extra load.
Baldwin decided to takeon a small piece of the problem himself.
Elbra was ready to takeon the world.
Students can be disinclined to takeon the responsibilities that come
with greater voice.
Take to
_______________________
They tooktospending their evenings in the humid…
When you and I tookto writing down our dreams.
Laklani eventually tookto lying about how much he was paying.
She tookto wearing a dirty raincoat, spent too much time alone at the
Faculty Club.
He took to eating and drinking too much also, that most gentle of all the sins.
Come along
_______________________
Many a time, I sat outside waiting for someone to come along but it
was never bust while I was there.
I'm no fool; a chance like this doesn't come along every day, so I can
hardly pass it up.
Rosie also invited her brother Jimmy to comealong.
You can comealong if you want.
She was mine until you comealong!
Even my 94-year-old grandmother has comealong for the ride.
Come across
_______________________
You must have come across examples of this kind of thing.
You are likely to come across people with different problems which
need a different approach.
This is one publication I have not come across before.
Chances are you've comeacross the website Wikipedia in your daily
online searches.
You don't comeacross people like that very often.
Come back
_______________________
I have to go now, but I'll come back tomorrow.
‘I'll come backagain with you, father,’ she said.
Peter had come back from hospital in his own but in tearing good
spirits.
They don't usually comeback after nine.
Come up with
_______________________
I am usually able to come up with an idea.
who very well might comeupwith a good plan.
so the sooner the two of you comeupwith a plan of action, the
better.
I comeupwith any excuse possible to go to the grocery store.
Come up against I'd never When you're doing any job, you comeupagainst anything like that in my entire life. comeupagainst experiences of tension, humor and sadness.
32 The objective of this exercise was to read the sentences in front of each phrasal verb and infer its meaning through them. Also, TER11 had the meaning of each phrasal verb under the sentences and they only had to match them to the verb, while the other class had no meaning whatsoever (TAN11).
Once again, I tried to select very simple sentences since some students present a very low level of English. However it proved to be very difficult. Even though the students only had to read the sentences and match each phrasal verb with its meaning, the majority of the students wasn’t able to do that. Although the level of this exercise is much greater when compared to the first one that I gave them, it was very similar to one exercise that they had in their course book. The difference laid on the amount of sentences students had to read. I thought that if I provided them with more examples they would be able to infer the meaning more easily. But I was wrong because apart from the students who have been studying English for some years, the students who are from the Guinea thought the exercise was very complex. First because they weren’t used to seeing so many sentences as an example and secondly because they don’t master the English language. While they were trying to do the exercise I had to resort to L1 and translate all the meanings and then all the sentences. Only after having done that, students managed to complete the exercise.
This exercise shows us that corpus-based exercises can vary a lot in terms of level of difficulty. If the first one was much simpler because students only had to detect patterns of usage, in this one they had to infer meanings and probably it was too advanced for this type of students.
On the other hand, TAN11 that did the same exercise without the help of the meaning of the phrasal verb managed to guess all meanings only by reading the examples that were given. In this sense, the sentences taken from the COCA and BNC were of great help in inferring the meaning.
I also had the opportunity to try some corpus-based exercises with the class from the private school. As I have previously mentioned, this class is very different from the ones from the vocational school since the students that belong to it have special
_______________________ Girls come up against an obstacle or two, maybe on tour, and they tend to give way instead of trying to overcome them.’
33 characteristics. To start with, these students are not learning English because they have to or because it is part of the syllabus. They are, in fact, taking the course because they want to learn more and acknowledge that learning and knowing a foreign language is of great importance nowadays.
Therefore, I prepared some corpus-based materials having in mind that these students also had an English training course divided into 12 units which dealt with different topics and different grammar structures. Each topic also dealt with specific grammar structures, usually more than one per unit. For this reason, the exercises that I chose to work with them were all related to structures the students had to learn during the training. As I started teaching them in November, I decided to start using corpus-based exercises from that moment on, therefore the research took place in November and December.
The first exercise used with them was related to the difference between “look like” and “look”. The students were shown a PowerPoint presentation where they read some sentences taken from the BNC and from the COCA. (Figure 9)
Figure 9- Sentences taken from BNC and COCA shown in the lesson
I love what looks like a cabinet but actually is big drawers.
That person on the street who lookslike a circus clown…
…or anything that lookslikea tax…
There's what lookslikea Spanish village…
…which lookslikea thermometer…
…who looks like a good candidate,
…where a tomato lookslikea tomato…
He looks tired.
Ms. Netrebko looks wonderful.
....it looks good.
I think the future looks good for us.
The rest of the world looks horrible.
34 Since I used this exercise on my first lesson with these particular students and I didn’t know what their level of English was going to be, I had previously selected simple sentences that I was sure they would be able to identify and whose vocabulary would be understandable.
After reading all the sentences, the students were asked to induce the rules, (Figure 10) and complete it with the missing words. In fact, they were able to do it very easily since they had the help of the underlined words.
Figure 10 - PowerPoint presentation showing the rule of “look like” and “look”
35 Figure 11 - Sentences taken from COCA and BNC for adjective + ing/ed
Once more, I selected simple sentences which they were able to understand in order to be easier for them to guess what the rule was.
Through this exercise, my main aim was that students were capable of finding out that the adjectives that end in “-ing” are used to describe things and situations while the adjectives that end in “–ed” are used to describe how people feel.
The students managed to find out that the adjectives ending in “-ed” were used with people and the adjectives ending in “-ing” were used with objects. Although the definition of the rule wasn’t totally correct “at the very least their inferences are likely to be relevant and comprehensible to them” (Boulton 2009: 84). The most important aspect was that through these sentences they were able to understand the difference between the two of them and were capable of using them in the exercises from their course book.
Another exercise that I had the opportunity to use with this class was related to the use of “too” and “enough” (figure 12). The students were shown the sentences below and were asked to observe and mention when the words “too” and “enough” were used. After having helped the students by saying that they should focus on the type of word, they were able to say that these words are used before and after adjectives, and before nouns.
Once again, through the use of corpus-based sentences it became relatively simple for them to infer when these words should be used. Students reacted very well to these type of exercises and seemed that they could understood better the language patterns. It is also curious that the student who has always revealed more difficulties in expressing herself and understanding the texts was one of the most enthusiasts. She
A. Read the sentences. B. What is the rule?
1. The results are surprising.
2. Maybe this is surprising,
3. It is a bit surprising.
4. ...so it is hardly surprising.
5. His life in Los Angeles was actually relaxing.
6. This is so relaxing.
7. It's relaxing.
1. He was relaxed.
2. ...and end up feeling more relaxed.
3. You'll be surprised at how helpful people can be.
4. We were really surprised a little bit.
5. You're not surprised to learn.
6. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he's back.
36 wasn’t afraid of trying to express what her inference was and most of the times she inferred the meaning correctly.
Figure 12- BNC and COCA concordances for the use of “too” and “enough”
The last corpus–based exercise used with this class was related to the prepositions which come after some adjectives. It is well-known that students sometimes make mistakes when they have to use certain prepositions either with verbs or with adjectives. Having this in mind, I decided to pick up the list of adjectives they would have to know and study and took some examples from COCA and BNC. I decided to take more than one example so that they could more easily understand the purpose of the exercise. Then, they had to read all sentences and decide which preposition came after each adjective and make a list. Through this way they could read more than one sentences, i.e. they had more examples for the same adjective and preposition which allowed them to memorise the prepositions more easily. (Figure 13)
1. Notifications can also be too subtle.
2. It's not too soon to begin planning for next year.
3. Decisions that are too urgent...
4. ...are neither too complex nor too fast...
5....risks are too qualitatively different.
6. ...influences are much too complicated.
7. ...it becomes too difficult.
8. ...that study is too poor...
9....it may already be too late....
10....governments have often been too generous...
1. These attacks are common enough.
2. When they are mature enough.
3. When the mass is large enough,...
4. I am not yet confident enough...
5. These methods have to be both rigorous and simple enough.
6. ...it was detected early enough...
7. ...not hard enough...
1. there would never be enough research...
2. There was almost enough evidence...
3. ...they have enough credits...
4....it has had enough time...
5... we do not yet have enough experience to evaluate...
6....that would provide enough space...
37 Figure 13- Example of a corpus-based exercise for the adjectives and its prepositions.
1. Which prepositions come after the adjectives? Underline them and fill in the table.
he was proud of them / And my mother was proud of him/ You must be so proud of your son, / I am even more proud of her than I was before / I'm really proud of my daughters,
I never felt angry with Beth / I thought everybody was angry with me / you were angry with me / I won't be angry with you / I'm so angry about the way they're treating Romney / He was angry about getting old / Partain is angry about his cancer
No one was satisfied with the way this was going / Ms. Ferber, satisfied with the draft, / he was " real satisfied' with the campaign / you may be satisfied with what you find at the restaurant A group of mean girls, jealous of Kim. / he wasn't jealous of everyone / I don't think they're
jealous of me. / They're jealous of your youth.
I wasn't particularly fond of clowns, / He was fond of surprise presents, / Muriel was fond of Lawrence Welk. / Muriel was fond of Lawrence Welk.
people were crazy about their dogs / I'm still not crazy about it, / I wasn't crazy about the program's / he was crazy about her / he was crazy about her / Once your dog's crazy about birds and hunting / I was really crazy about that person. / That boy's crazy about you,
They're afraid of their own shadows / girls like me aren't afraid of their fathers./ I shouldn't have been afraid of those ladies / But I was afraid of him, / He was afraid of darkness,
Let us be depressed about it. / I'm depressed about all of this / he got depressed about his work Travis wasn't too sure about that./ She still wasn't sure about him / I'm sure about you / I was so
sure about loving someone.
I'm not sad about the fact / I'd be lying if I said I don't feel sad about that / she was always sad about the way that this happened / his says something very sad about our society
She was ashamed of me / I was ashamed of myself / Do not be ashamed of your youth. / Lucy was ashamed of herself
She was already bored with the recovery process / He's bored with that./ I was bored with the television shows
he Arab world that feels impatient with any process / But the left is increasingly impatient with Mr. Obama / he had grown impatient with my opinions
I was disappointed with the picture / I was disappointed with their responses / You feel disappointed with yourself
You were nervous about Chloe, too. / he's a bit nervous about all this. / I would be nervous about going into a bar or restaurant
This exercise ended up by being the one that they did more easily. Even the student that, in my opinion, usually had more difficulties in the class, was actively participating Adjectives Prepositions
______________________ _____________________ _____________________ ______________________ _____________________ ______________________ ______________________ _____________________ ______________________ _____________________ ______________________ _____________________ ______________________ _____________________ ______________________ _____________________ ______________________ _____________________ ______________________ _____________________
Adjectives Prepositions
39
III. 3. CORPUS-BASED EXERCISES:
STUDENTS’ OPINIONS
As I have above mentioned, after having put in practice the corpus-based exercises with these three classes, I gave them a questionnaire where they should analyze the impact of corpora in their learning.
Although I was able to observe students’ behaviour in class while they were doing the exercises, I wanted to have more tangible information that could came straight from them. Therefore, the questionnaire that they were given, also referred to the use of corpora in the classroom and to what extent they would be useful or not.
As I have also referred, from the classes from the Vocational School, only 17 and 16 respectively answered to the questionnaire. As most students come from Guinea, I asked all the questions in Portuguese in order to facilitate their understanding. However, some students didn’t understand what they had to answer in each question. For this reason, some of the questionnaires aren’t of great help in this research paper.
On the other hand, all the students from the private training school who answered the questionnaires managed to do it properly and stated their opinion concerning the corpus-based exercises. They mention that this type of exercise is useful because they “are easier to understand when compared with the explanations from course books” and “exercises are easier to understand and one can learn better this way.”
Curiously, the students who answered properly the questionnaire were unanimous. All of them mention in one way or another that these type of exercises is easier to understand and also easier to learn. They believe that these type of exercises help them to understand the exercises better, allowing them to learn in a “better” and easier way.
