Using insights from corpora in coursebooks and learner dictionaries
In 1983, the COBUILD project team began to think of the implications of their studies for teaching, and to develop an English coursebook based on a lexical syllabus, ie one organized around items of vocabulary rather than structures (as, for example, is the norm in Grammar-Translation syllabus design). They began with material based on the 700 most common word forms of the language, which would be the teaching input to the first volume of the course, Level 2 would add 800 more, and Level 3 would add 1,000 more, whilst recycling words from the previous levels. 70% of the English we use or understand is made up of the 700 most common words in English. The most frequent 1,500 words account for around 76%, and the most frequent 2,500 words for 80% of all text in English. The commonest word forms in the English language comprise function words, modal and other major verbal forms, such has 'have', 'know', 'say' and 'think', and nouns such as 'people', 'man', 'time' and 'way'.
In the course of the analysis, facts about the language that had not previously been available emerged. One was that the more frequent a word is, the less meaning it has. For example, consider the word, 'have', in 'a table to have our meals at', or 'it's normal to have at least one evening off a week'. Another finding was that a whole set of items revealed itself as having a kind of meaning that had no semantic importance, but that seemed to function as a means of smoothing communication between speaker and hearer. Items such as, 'you know', or, 'I mean', are now well known as having this type of pragmatic meaning in conversation.
Activity 6
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Look at the following extract of naturally occurring spoken English. Some vocabulary items with pragmatic functions are underscored. For each item, say which function it seems to fulfil. 'Do you think then
that the way you relate to like people who aren't Christian
and your attitudes towards them like whether you decide to accept
certain people and you know get a bit peed off with other
people and stuff like that, do you think it is affected by
your faith, like you were saying you have kind of moral standards
of not like hooliganising and things I mean do you think
that's because of your faith or do you think that's because well
because of society or whatever' As a follow up, choose a stretch of naturally occurring speech from the language you teach. Which items seem to have functions like the ones exemplified in the English extract? Do you teach such items to your classes? How? |
Click on 'Commentary' for feedback on this activity.
The authors of the first English language coursebook to use a lexical syllabus, Dave and Jane Willis (Willis and Willis, 1988), found through their research that certain very important words and patterns were often omitted from coursebooks, whilst other very much less important items took up far too much space in elementary courses. They wondered what the reaction of teaching colleagues would be to the inclusion of certain very frequent items in a coursebook for near beginners, such as abstract senses of words, or syntactic features which might be deemed too advanced for elementary learners. They realized that teachers might be used to a prescriptive view of language teaching, in which learners were taught 'correct' forms, in an agreed order, and they might not be ready to take on a descriptive view, ie to teach what is actually said and written, whether or not it conforms to what is perceived as 'correct'.
Willis (1990) gives an account of how the course writers went about producing coursebook material based on the Birmingham corpora. In the introduction he explains that the starting point was meaningful exposure to the target language, and that three principles were borne in mind:
- The language that learners would be expected to understand and produce should be graded in some way.
- The language that learners would be exposed to would be carefully selected so as to cover the patterns and meanings they would most likely meet outside the classroom.
- There would be some way of itemizing the language syllabus so as to highlight important features of their language experience, and point to what they should have learned from that experience.
In creating their lexical syllabus, Jane and Dave Willis found themselves in a dilemma. They experienced a tension between wanting to grade language in some way, just as the old grammatical syllabus had done, and wanting to expose learners to real, naturally occurring language, from which they could learn at their own pace and for their own needs. In Willis' own words (1990):
The process of syllabus design involves itemising language to identify what is to be learned. Communicative methodology involves exposure to natural language use to enable learners to apply their innate faculties to recreate language systems. There is an obvious contradiction between the two. An approach which itemises language seems to imply that items can be learned discretely, and that the language can be built up from an accretion of these items. Communicative methodology is holistic in that it relies on the ability of learners to abstract from the language to which they are exposed, in order to recreate a picture of the target language. The lexical syllabus attempts to reconcile these contradictions. It does itemise language. It itemises language minutely, resting on a large body of research into natural language. On the basis of this research it makes realistic and economical statements about what is to be learned. But the methodology associated with the lexical syllabus does not depend on itemisation. It allows learners to experience language items in natural contexts and to learn from their experience.
Many current coursebooks include systematic vocabulary practice including dictionary skills. The Longman Cutting Edge series for English as a foreign language, for example (see Jillett, 2001), has a mini-dictionary included with the coursebook, which is referred to in each unit. In class, we can vary our own approach to vocabulary teaching, sometimes encouraging and sometimes discouraging the use of dictionaries. This is helpful because, to be autonomous learners outside the classroom, our learners not only need to be able to make intelligent use of a dictionary when they have access to it, but also to develop strategies for coping without a dictionary. Good dictionaries that are specifically designed for language learners, use definitions expressed in simple controlled vocabulary, examples in context, and grammatical or cultural information about the given word. We therefore owe it to our learners to train them in the use of these dictionaries, whether print-based or electronic, and to give them directed practice in class.
Most dictionaries these days are based on a corpus or bank of language data, and many corpora, including the COBUILD ones, are accessible online, without the need to download concordancing software such as the Oxford Wordsmith Tools package (Scott, 2003), though this is useful for creating your own corpus of, for example, the kind of texts your students need to understand for their specialism. Tribble (2003) gives a helpful survey review of online dictionaries, and Trotman (2003) shows how a lexical syllabus can be combined with web technology. Here is one of his activities:
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Online dictionaries Task 1 Task 2 |
