Oral Presentation

VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT
THROUGH CONCORDANCES
IN A GREEK ESP CONTEXT
FOTINI KARANIKOLA
UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN MACEDONIA

TOPIC AND MAIN AIM OF THE PAPER
• This pilot project deals with an alternative and more
motivating way of approaching vocabulary instruction
within a Greek ESP context, with the help of a computer
software (concordancer), which analyzes electronically
gathered reading texts (corpora) for the discovery of
regular patterns and lexical sets, an approach called
Data-Driven Learning (DDL).
• This approach, which has been decided after a needs
analysis, is quite promising since it integrates technology
to promote learners’ motivation and vocabulary
development.

SAMPLE AND THE PARTICULAR TEACHING
CONTEXT
• The participants of this advanced ESP course are students of the first
semester, 80% female (40 girls) and 20% male (10 boys) of the University
of Western Macedonia in Florina, (Department of Primary Education, Faculty
of Pedagogy), their age is from 18-39 years old and some of them have got
the first and the proficiency certificates.
• The English language is a core subject in the two semesters of the
department which engages students in reading relevant authentic materials,
helping them increase both linguistic and academic skills, enhance their
subject knowledge and develop English language skills.
• The teaching methods used are traditional teacher centered lectures,
vocabulary is taught via translation and synonyms, whereas assessment
methods are written exams and mini assignments.
• The motivation is very low since most of them dislike studying and
learning ESP vocabulary in the traditional way.
• Having looked at the problematic context of the Greek reality and in order to
introduce an alternative teaching approach the teacher decided to
conduct a needs analysis research through the means of questionnaires.

MATERIAL DESIGN
NEEDS ANALYSIS QUESTIONNAIRE
• Quoting Sifakis (2000, p. 136) “needs analysis is the process where
the profile of a particular teaching situation (involving
learners, materials and actual lessons) is drawn”.
• By determining students needs is a movement towards a learnercentered
instruction, where teaching should be designed to meet
the precise needs of the learner.
• The particular questionnaire consists of four conceivable parts,
each one covering different needs and providing different
information.
• Part A generally focuses on respondents’ personal facts.
• Part B seeks information about respondents’ present level of the
target language, their attitude towards English course and their
target language needs.
• Part C explores difficulties and deficiencies related to all four skills in
learning vocabulary.
• Part D is regarded as the most crucial as it investigates valuable
information concerning learners’ preferred class activities, teaching
experiences so far and their learning/ teaching needs.

RESULTS OF THE QUESTIONNAIRE
• The total number of questionnaires administered to students was 40
but only 23 were completed and returned (so a limitation of a small
sample could not be neglected).
• The detailed quantitative data have been analyzed with the SPSS
statistical program and the results are presented in a combined way
of tables and bars charts (in a more convenient and reader friendly
way).
• The most prevalent results were that half of the students were
holders of the proficiency degree and they wanted to be in contact
with the English language (47, 8%), which indicates a positive and
promising attitude towards learning English.
• They were also interested in terminology acquisition although they
had great difficulties in reading vocabulary with relevant
terminology. (47, 8%)
• They disliked traditional ways of vocabulary instruction and activities
(69, 6%), they liked working in groups (47, 8%) and there was
obvious favor in the use of the computer lab (95, 7%)!
• Athough the majority had never heard about concordances (78,
3%), they believed that collocations and studying whole sentences
would offer better results in their vocabulary development and
acquisition (47, 8%).

CHOOSING SOFTWARE
• The writer after having conducted an extended internet
research she decided to use WordSmith Tools 5 concordancer
for the particular project. This freeware software package is
published by the Oxford University Press, was developed by
Mike Scott, it was downloaded from
http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/index.html and is
accompanied by a thorough and informative manual.
• This program can create concordances, perform keyword
analyses and compile word-frequency lists.
• The Wordlist tool will let the students see a list of all the
words or word-clusters in a text and to identify the contextual
information necessary to disambiguate words.

A concordance looks something like this:

COMPILING THE CORPUS
• Being influenced by Aston (2002), who supports that these corpora can be
specifically targeted to the learners’ knowledge and concerns, the teacher
decided to use the internet as a researching and retrieving source.
• She had gathered and saved 41 thematically related downloadable articles
containing 600-3000 words each, so all together this experimental corpus
contains approximately 60.000 words and as the titles of the stored texts
suggest, they concern pedagogical and methodological issues.
• She also took into consideration Zhang’s (2008) suggestions about selfbuilding
a mini corpus[1] and followed Tribble and Jones’s (1990, p.14)
suggestions that “a corpus of 50.000 words should be very useful for
classroom purposes”.
• According to Lewis (2000), cited in Watson Todd (2001), this is a corpus of
specific genre of text, being compiled by academic and newspaper/journal
feature articles.
•
[1] Namely a mini-corpus should be learner-oriented (the texts collected
must be of learners interest or concern), understandable and difficulty
suitable (so as students will not be frustrated by the non comprehensible
instances of the corpus. It should be fully analyzable, easy to become
familiar with and clearly patterned (collocations and other words

IMPLEMENTATION
• THE STAGES (PRE-/WHILE-/POST) OF THE
PROCEDURE FOLLOWED DURING THE PROJECT
• OBJECTIVE : to enhance vocabulary
development and exploitation by using authentic
language
• TEACHING PROCEDURE >>>>AIMS >>>>TIME

• Activity A
• Sts are divided into two groups
and work in pairs.
• They read the activity sheet and
follow the instructions to get
acquainted with the search and
retrieval techniques used in
concordance software. They type
the word DISCIPLINE and retrieve
the concordance list and save it.
They observe the collocation sets
and consult the stored texts by
double clicking on the KWIC
• ---------------------------------------
• Activity B
• Sts observe and study the
concordaner list concerning the
various meanings of the retrieved
word.
PRE - PHASE
• To practice computer and
concordance skills
• To raise the interest and
motivation to work with authentic
material data
• To encourage group/pair work
• (15 MIN)
• -----------------------------------------
• To focus
patterns
on specific lexical
• To develop interpretative skills
• To convey meaning
multiword patterns
from
• To teach text analysis techniques
• To observe habitual collocations
and discover new meanings
• To engage sts in active
participation in the process of
learning
• To provide
examples
sts with natural
(10 MIN)

• Activity C
• Sts write down the examples and infer
meanings
• -----------------------------------------------
• Activity D
• Sts deal further with collocations and
colligations
• -----------------------------------------------
• Activity E
• Sts look up the word in an on line
dictionary. They note down useful
information about the use of the word.
They can also consult the dictionary’s
audio file.
• -----------------------------------------------
• Activity F
• Sts complete the gap filling task
WHILE - PHASE
• To capture specialized phraseology
• To break away from rule-based
approach into the DDL approach
• To consult relevant concordance
material through direct access to the
corpora
• To analyze data and draw conclusions
(10 MIN)
• ----------------------------------------------
• To demonstrate features of
vocabulary, typical collocations and
grammar points
• To promote sts construction process
• To relate words to syntax (10 MIN)
• ----------------------------------------------
• To become critical of dictionary entries
• To engage sts into discovery,
divergent and serendipity learning
• To base on sts own explorations
(15 MIN)
• -----------------------------------------------
• To stimulate sts cognition
• To build sts competence
• To make specific personal
contribution to the tasks (10 MIN)

POST - PHASE
• Activity G
• Sts search the web for
the given word, they skim
and scan related texts
and save them on their
computers for further
use.
• To bring sts a sense of
responsibility
• To turn
researchers
sts into
• To become more
independent readers
• To analyze and interpret
data
• To encourage sts to act
as the producers of
research rather than
passive receptacles
• (20 MIN)

• Entries for discipline use [translation] definition [examples]
• as noun1. discipline noun a branch of knowledge: "in what discipline is
his doctorate?"; "teachers should be well trained in their subject";
"anthropology is the study of human beings"
See also: subject , subject area , subject field , field , field of study ,
study , branch of knowledge
2. discipline noun training to improve strength or self-control
3. discipline noun the trait of being well behaved: "he insisted on
discipline among the troops"
4. discipline noun a system of rules of conduct or method of practice:
"he quickly learned the discipline of prison routine" or "for such a plan
to work requires discipline"
5. discipline noun the act of punishing: "the offenders deserved the
harsh discipline they received"
See also: correction
• as noun, uncountable; countable6. discipline noun, uncountable;
countable 訓 練 , 鍛 鍊 , 磨 練 training, esp of the mind and character,
aimed at producing self-control, obedience; method by which training
may be given: 1. Strict discipline is imposed on army recruits. 2. Yoga
is a good discipline for learning to relax. 新 兵 受 到 嚴 格 的 訓 練
See also: training , drill , drilling , schooling , indoctrination , rigor ,
enforcement of rules , diligent exercise , practice , preparation
• as verb7. discipline verb train by instruction and practice; esp.
to teach self-control: "Parents must discipline their children"
See also: train , check , condition

BENEFITS OF CONCORDANCERS AND
CORPORA IN L2 TEACHING AND LEARNING
• Corpus is a gold mine of authentic language use and mining that
through KWIC concordances can provide students with multiple
contexts, from which new vocabulary can be learned.
• Language students deduce the meaning and the patterns of the
word are immediately clear if students analyze several examples of
the word.
• What the concordancer does is to “make the invisible visible” by
locating or discovering collocations. (Tribble, 1996, p.11)
• Learners play the role of a researcher who explores the use of
language through investigating an authentic corpus. (Johns and
King, 1990)
• Concordances help to implement a student-centered approach
which empowers the learners to work on an autonomous basis.
(Gonzalez, 1999)
• Language learners can benefit from teaching materials promoting
inductivity, authenticity and learner responsibility for
learning. (Stevens, 1991 a)

POSSIBLE LIMITATIONS
• Some students may become quickly overwhelmed and
demotivated if they are provided with too much data.
• The vocabulary would often be beyond their level ability.
• Preparation and development of the material takes a lot
of time.
• Students need to be trained so as to use the resources
correctly.
• Corpus –based pedagogical materials are not widely
used by teachers and learners.

EXPECTED OUTCOMES OF THE PROPOSAL
• Teachers can use concordances to find examples of authentic
usage to demonstrate features of vocabulary, typical collocations
and they can generate exercises based on examples drawn from a
variety of corpora.
• Students based on their own explorations can discover rules,
new meanings and draw inferences from lexical features by
searching for key words in context, turning themselves into
researchers.
• They can be more active, motivated and autonomous in their
vocabulary learning as they observe habitual collocations and
relate words to syntax.
• They can use the gathered authentic linguistic information for
error analysis or as an aid to improve their reading and writing
skills.
• It is hoped that educators who plan to run or are currently running
a similar technology mediated course can benefit from this
example of teaching.

• THANK YOU !