Editorial
The article first appeared in a special issue of the ETAI Forum 2013, celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Lexical Approach.

Teaching with Concordancing Tools

Renee Wahl, Israel

Renee Wahl is a veteran teacher, teacher trainer, online course designer and administrator, Raviv She is a method practitioner, and now also co-editor of the ETAI Forum. E-mail: wahlschool@gmail.com

One of the biggest challenges to EFL teachers is to help our pupils expand and enrich their vocabulary. Over the 30 years that I have been teaching at high school and university level, I have been looking for effective, efficient and creative ways to meet this challenge.

To my mind, the burning questions are where to start and how to proceed along a continuum that starts with survival vocabulary and continues to a rich variety of usage. When we start teaching vocabulary, at the lowest grade levels, we use cognates (words that are similar in English and Hebrew: banana- ,בננה radio-(רדיו. These words are known to our youngsters and give them a certain level of comfort and self-confidence in the new experience of learning another language. The next stage is to teach words for classes of everyday items such as colors, numbers, food, animals, family, etc. The methodology is mostly listening and speaking.

At the next stage, children are taught the alphabet, phonics and decoding and we teach them to recognize and/or decode many of the words that they have already learned orally. At this stage, phonetic decoding seems to take preference over vocabulary acquisition. What I mean is that when teaching the short ‘a’ sound, the words used might be, “The fat cat sat on the mat.” These words are important for teaching the ‘a’ sound, but how important is it for the pupils to learn the meaning of ‘fat’ or ‘mat’? If our pupils get “stuck” at this stage, the result will often be 8th graders who can “read” a text beautifully, but who have little or no idea what that text means. I have taught 9th graders who don’t know the meaning of ‘with’.

There is an excellent tool to help us make sure that our pupils are acquiring the basic vocabulary that they need. Lists of word frequencies can be downloaded from the Internet. Here are some links to follow, or simply Google “word frequency lists”:

http://havefunteaching.com/worksheets/english-worksheets/high-frequency-words-worksheets or try this shortened link http://tinyurl.com/q2ebe4h

www.logicofenglish.com/resources/spelling-lists/high-frequency-word-lists

www.esltrail.com/2008/08/sight-words-vocabulary-list.html

These lists give the most frequently used 200, 500, 1000, 2000 etc. words in the English language listed according to frequency. Most of these lists start with ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘and’ and such. In any given text, the first 250 most frequently used words will make up 50-60% of that text. (See the marked up text below taken from an old Module F exam) My conclusion is that we should make sure our pupils learn these words. I gave my weak ninth grade pupils a list of the 250 most frequent words and asked them just to tick off the words they were sure they knew. I was shocked at the gaps! Since then, I actively teach these words and include words from the lists in every quiz and test.

Developing depth of vocabulary knowledge

Once we get up to the fifth year of EFL classes, our pupils need a deeper understanding of vocabulary than just the English word and its Hebrew translation. They begin to write using a dictionary and come up with infelicities such as:

It is difficult for adults to contact with teenagers.

When we point out that the correct word here is communicate, they insist that the dictionary provides ‘contact’ as ליצור קשר and that this is perfectly correct. We need to point out that some words in Hebrew have multiple synonyms in English and vice versa. Leo Selivan provided me with the following examples:

There are different Hebrew words for picking fruit/vegetables. Ask learners to imagine that they had to explain the difference to an English speaker and why different Hebrew verbs go with olives (למסוק), with oranges (לקטוף) and grapes (לבצוע) They'd be stuck.
How about translating the word to ‘put on’ clothing: put on socks (לגרוב), put on a sweater (ללבוש), put on a hat (לחבוש). They will find that the difference between them is not their denotational meaning but rather how they are used, i.e what they go with (=collocate). It works the other way around too – from Hebrew to English: Why is להשיג different for goal (reach), accomplish (task), achieve (success)?

I think it was at an International ETAI Conference in the 1990s that I heard Michael Lewis discuss collocations and the “Lexical Approach” to language learning for the first time. Lewis’s ideas made sense and I began to try them out in my classes.

When I first started using the Lexical Approach, the tools available were various academic concordances which gave sentence fragments with the target word highlighted and showing its immediate neighbors to the left and right (see example below for the target word, ACCEPT)*

having to ACCEPT steadily falling conditions
forced to ACCEPT only one of these
willing to ACCEPT. Ape's final 115 votes
asking him to ACCEPT a signed photograph
that they ACCEPT ultimate responsibility
ready to ACCEPT the existing borders
choose to ACCEPT from (but not terminate
could learn to ACCEPT the animals like me
he therefore may ACCEPT the offer of someone

From this, we can learn that the verbs that collocate with ‘accept’ include: having to, forced to, willing to, ask someone to, ready to, choose to, learn to, and by the number of times each of these verbs appears in the list, which are the most common. We can also see some of the objects (appearing after the word) that ‘accept’ collocates with: conditions, votes, responsibility, borders, offer.

The first thing I used this concordance for was to help my pupils understand when to use ‘make’ and when to use ‘do’. Following Lewis’s suggestion, I gave my 11th grade pupils printouts of a concordance output for each word and we tried inductive reasoning – to extract a rule from the many examples. After demonstrating to the whole class how a concordance output works, I found that pair and group-work are good methods to use for this activity. It worked very well, but it is time-consuming and at best I can do it only once in a while and with a class that is cooperative.

Since those early Lexical Approach days, much thought has gone into creating new tools and methodologies for implementing this approach. At the British Council, pre-ETAI-Conference workshop last summer, we were introduced to several new lexical tools. Among these, www.netspeak.com and http://just-the-word.com

Using a projector I showed my pupils how to look up the collocations for a word on www.netspeak.com. Their homework was to look up the words usual, ordinary, regular, routine and try to find the difference in their usage, i.e. which words they collocate with. They did a pretty good job for the first time and are on their way to recognizing that usage of a word is as important as its translation.

In my next lesson, I used just-the-word to find collocations that would explain the difference between the words achieve, accomplish, attain, reach. In addition to giving a list of collocations, just-the-word has another very useful feature. Clicking on the button, “View in Wordle”, will give a graphic representation (see below) of the relative frequencies of the collocations. My pupils loved it.

I can’t say that all my pupils were enthusiastic about our spending so much time on collocations. They tend to prefer a simple translation, definition or rule. However, I wasn’t deterred too much by “Is this for the Bagrut?” type complaints. We ended on a humorous note:

What’s the difference between ‘complete’ and ‘finished’? After all, if you complete your work, you’ve finished it. In Hebrew, the translation for the adjectives of these words is the same – הושלם. I let them discuss this for a while and then told them that the best answer to this question I’ve heard was:

If you marry the right woman, you are complete.
If you marry the wrong woman, you are finished.
If the right woman ever catches you with the wrong woman, (and a few of my pupils who got it right away, called out) you are completely finished!

* From Lextutor, www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html, Nov 15, 2012 and specifically http://conc.lextutor.ca/concordancers/wwwassocwords.pl Julia on the Go Learning to Relax module F

Last week I received a letter from one of this column's regular readers. Just back from a week of exploring Hawaii's volcanoes, she was eager to share her experiences. "There's nothing like watching the lava flow into the ocean before your very eyes," she wrote. "People who spend their holidays just lying on the beach don't know what they're missing."

Actually, I've been receiving quite a few letters like this lately. For a growing number of vacationers, it seems, rest and relaxation are no longer the name of the game. Instead, they are looking for ways to expand their horizons. According to the World Tourism Organization (WTO), edu-tourism Ñ short for educational tourism Ñ is the fastest growing segment of the industry. The demand has prompted museums, universities and wildlife organizations to offer vacationers the opportunity to study anything from volcanoes in Hawaii to art in Paris and marine life in the Mediterranean.

Not surprisingly, the best place to find your educational vacation of choice is the Internet, where dozens of companies cater to every taste. If you're seeking cultural enrichment, try In the Know (intheknow.com), which organizes art and theatre tours to world capitals. Or you can turn to where2.com for a list of travel companies specializing in music festivals. For those of you looking for something more adventurous, there are plenty of science tours providing a glimpse into hidden corners of the natural world.

The Rain forest Rover Company (rainrover.com) offers a week of bird-watching in Jamaica, home to more than 25 endangered species. Or you might decide to join a safari and go watch African mountain gorillas in their natural surroundings (gorillawatch.com).

Tourists who want the education without forgoing the relaxation can opt for one of the many deals offered by hotels worldwide. Hotel Capricio in Venice will give you a gondola ride around the city, followed by a glass-blowing workshop. And at Crater Lodge in Phoenix, Arizona, guests bored with sitting around the pool can take part in a workshop on desert photography. For other tempting offers, try holidayup.com. Whatever your preference, you won't get the most out of your educational vacation without a highly-qualified guide. Most companies pride themselves on employing top experts in their field Ñ historians, art critics, zoologists Ñ but it's probably a good idea to check out their credentials before making your choice.

Finally, veterans of educational vacations often speak of an added bonus: You don't have to endure the awkward silences that are common among strangers on package tours. Apparently, when you've just come face to face with a giant gorilla, there's plenty to talk about.

(Adapted from "Learning to Relax", Newsweek, April 19 / April 26, 2004)

Words from the Dolch list of 1-250
251-1000
1001-2000

Collocations with achieve using View in Wordle function on just-the-word

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