Making friends with DDL: helping students enrich their vocabulary

María Belén Díez Bedmar

María Belén Díez Bedmar is a research assistant at the University of Jaén. In 2004 she wrote her MA Dissertation on the use of learner corpora. Now, she is currently working on her PhD Thesis on the interlanguage development of Spanish students of English at University level. E-mail: belendb@ujaen.es

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1. Introduction
2. DDL: still a new approach for some students (and teachers!)
3. Using DDL in the classroom: refreshing students' memory
4. Working with DDL: room
4.1. Devising the activity
4.2. Carrying out the activity: making students think hard!
4.3. Results of the activity: students' classifications
4.4. Raising students' awareness: comparing their classifications
5. Conclusions
6. References
7. Appendix

Vocabulary is a crucial aspect to take into account in the interlanguage (Selinker, 1972) development of foreign students of English. In fact, it is '[…] the only component of linguistic competence which can continue growing throughout an individual's lifetime.' (Lenko-Szymanska, 2002: 218). Some corpus-based pieces of research have focused on the quantification of students' improvement when using the vocabulary of the foreign language (cf. Read, 1988; Nation, 2000, 2001; Schmitt, 2000, etc.) by means of tests (Meara, 1994; Laufer and Nation, 1999; Schmitt, 2000; Nation, 2001, etc.) or other instruments (Fearch, C., Haastrup, H. and Phillipson, R, 1984; Laufer and Nation, 1995; Meunier, 1998), while other researchers have devoted their efforts to one of the most outstanding characteristics of learners' language: their non-nativeness, which stems from the speech-like nature of their language (Granger and Rayson, 1998: 129; Kaszubski, 2001: 318; Aijmer, 2002: 72-73, among others). Furthermore, it is well-known that the vocabulary that students use is vague, because of their lack of a wide range of vocabulary items to choose from. Therefore, texts are less informative and have a less sophisticated appearance. In fact, students may '[...] produce a lot, but they do not actually say a lot' (de Haan, 1999: 205; italics as in the original).

Both characteristics, students' non-nativeness and vague use of the language, can be clearly seen in their production of noun phrases. If students do not have frequent access to relevant input, it is difficult for them to decide if the concept they want to communicate can be 'summarized' in the premodification of a noun phrase (often in collocation) or, rather, the concept needs to be expressed by means of postmodification. This hesitation frequently leads students to use longer stretches of language to communicate ideas that could have naturally been expressed in fewer words. Just to mention some examples of learner language, students use the expression *a room where you can't smoke for a non-smoking room and *a room which is free for a vacant room.
What follows is a description of a class I prepared for my students when I noticed an important gap in their vocabulary, which led them to the above mentioned non-nativeness and vague use of the language. The students I am teaching now are doing a degree on English and Tourism (Licenciado en Filología Inglesa + Diplomado en Turismo) at the University of Jaén (Spain), and will be expected to have a high command of the foreign language in their future jobs as tourist guides, hotel managers, etc. In order to achieve that command of English, their curriculum includes two compulsory annual courses in the first two years of their four-year degree. The courses, Inglés Instrumental Intermedio and Inglés Instrumental Avanzado (English at an intermediate and advanced level, respectively) are not ESP courses, but cover the general use of English. While in the first course students are supposed to reach a level of English similar to that stated by the Cambridge 'First Certificate in English' (FCE) examination, the second one aims at the 'Certificate of Proficiency in English' (CPE), but the courses do not focus on the special needs that these ESP students may have.

The needs' analysis took place at the end of a class, when the students were encouraged to brainstorm all the vocabulary they could related to the semantic fields 'tourism' or 'travelling', as they were the topics to be dealt with in the following classes. As expected, students were able to provide the basic lexical items concerning means of transport, hotels, tourist resorts, etc. during the warming-up session. However, when trying to elicit more specific vocabulary, I noticed that students lacked knowledge on collocations and colligations. As a result and to prepare students for the topic, a vocabulary exercise was designed to help students enrich their vocabulary. Therefore, the present lesson was the result of an incidental focus on form, that is, on the linguistic elements as they arose in a class whose main purpose was communication, and brought about a session with a focus on forms (Long, 1991: 45-6).

Data-driven learning (Johns, 1991; Johns and King, 1991; etc.) is used to provide students with access to a large quantity of authentic and contextualized data, which may account for the lack of sufficient exposure to the target language in different contexts. This type of input, which favours the inductive approach, entails a change in the teacher's role in the classroom, from instructor to facilitator, and the students' more active role in their learning process, as they become in control of (Stevens, 1995) and responsible for it.

If instructed to exploit corpus-based data appropriately, mainly in KWIC format (either paper-based or on the screen), students can go through the three stages involved in DDL: observation, classification and generalization (Johns, 1991), and they can develop a reflexive consciousness about, or language awareness of, the FL to help them 'make(s) the invisible visible' (Tribble, 1990: 11).

Apart from the benefit of exposing students to corpus-based material, ¹ DDL also offers them the possibility to enjoy a type of 'discovery learning activities' (Aston, 2001: 19) in a learner-centred, low-competition and non-authoritarian environment, in which they can work at their own pace and focus on those aspects of the foreign language which are more problematic for them. Formulating hypotheses and thinking about how language works may also enhance a better retention of the knowledge in the long-term. Furthermore, training students to use the concordancer to answer their own questions about the language by means of corpus data also fosters the students' necessary learning autonomy (Bernardini, 2004: 27), which increases their self-steem, confidence (Yoon and Hirvela, 2004: 278) and motivation.

However, DDL also poses some limitations. To begin with, corpus use may not lead the learner to pedagogically appropriate generalisations (Aston, 1997: 52; Bernardini, 2002: 166), since students need to be trained and use the resources correctly. For this reason, and taking into account the students' proficiency level, a certain extent of manipulation from paper-based concordances to students' free access to any corpus should be exerted, thus helping students face the data (Thompson, 2001: 317), interpret them (Gavioli, 1997: 84), and not to be overwhelmed by the quantity (Flowerdew, 2001: 371), if a small corpus is not used. Another limitation that we can find in DDL is that discovery activities rely heavily on the learners' curiosity and interest (Bernardini, 2002: 167). However rich and supportive the learning environment, the teacher does not really know what will be learnt if a strict monitoring is not carried out. Besides, attention to the students' different learning styles should also be paid. For example, technophobic students may prefer exploring the language by means of paper-based work. Finally, it seems that DDL is more effective with the aspects of the language which are on the collocational border between syntax and lexis (Johns, 2002: 109). Thus, collocations and colligations seem to be the most suitable items to cover with DDL. In a nutshell, despite the advantages that it presents, DDL should not be seen as a panacea, '[…] but one among many techniques or aids which may be used to facilitate learning for some learners' (Kennedy, 1998: 293-4).

Many examples of materials based on DDL can be found in the literature related to ESP, EAP, lexical and grammatical acquisition, syllabus design and evaluation, translation, etc. (cf. Tribble, 1989, 1990; Tribble and Johns, 1990; Higgins, 1991; Stevens, 1991; Ilse, 1991; Thuratun, 1996; Kita and Ogata, 1997; Aston, 1998; Fox, 1998; Cobb, 1999; Bondi, 2001; Flowerdew, 2001; Ghadessy and Gao, 2001; Henry and Roseberry, 2001; Ragan, 2001; Todd, 2001; Weber, 2001; Sripicharn, 2004; etc.).

In order to help students enrich their vocabulary related to a specific semantic field, a DDL activity was designed due to two main reasons.

On the one hand, the students I am teaching at the moment had already had some experience with DDL. Last year they were the participants in a piece of research where a colleague and I (Pérez Cañado and Díez Bedmar, 2006) used the learner corpus that is being compiled and analysed at the University of Jaén (Díez Bedmar, 2004; 2005) to find out whether the use of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), as understood in the inclusive sense (Levy and Hubbard, 2005: 148), and Data-Driven

Learning could help raise awareness of and remediate the spelling and punctuation weaknesses of such students. Therefore, these students had already had a hands-on session in the computer lab where they worked with the British National Corpus (BNC). Furthermore, these students had also had the opportunity to learn more about DDL from various specialists in the field in the I International Conference TESS: Teachers of English to Spanish Speakers, which was held at the University of Jaén in March 2006. Among them, Dr. Pérez Paredes and Dr. Hanna Kryszewska's plenaries helped students frame theoretically and practically the experience they had enjoyed in the previous year.

On the other hand, a DDL activity would make students familiar with this way of accessing large amounts of data and answering their own questions about the foreign language. Thus, the teaching paradigm of presentation-practice-production was changed into another one where the emphasis on induction was more present, as suggested by other scholars (Lewis, 1993; McCarthy and Carter, 1995, among others). This new methodology also allowed me to teach students how to become independent learners, so that in the future they can answer their own questions about the language with the help of the resources they have at their disposal. ²

The brainstorming carried out during the warming-up highlighted the lack of vocabulary my students have in their specific semantic field, that is, tourism. It struck my attention that they were only able to remember two types of room (i.e. single room and double room), not even asking me questions about other possible types of room. Therefore, I decided to use the word room to devise the DDL activity.

Some practicalities had to be considered to plan the activity. To begin with, I had to reject the idea of taking the students to the computer lab (where they would have access to freely available online corpora) because of several reasons. First, there is not any computer lab available for the time slot I teach these students. Second, I wanted students to focus on the analysis of the concordance lines, rather than in the exploitation of corpora. Since they had already had the experience of retrieving data from online corpora in the previous year, I decided to devote the whole session (one hour and a half) to help them interpret the data, which may be one of the most difficult aspects students struggle with once the data are compiled. Finally, I know that there are some students in my class who do not feel comfortable when working with computers. Not to discourage these students from doing the activity, I decided to provide all of them with paper-based concordance lines. Those who enjoy working with computers would anyway be encouraged to query various corpora at home and share their findings with me in tutorials, probably to prepare more material for the other students in the class.

The number of concordance lines was also another factor to be taken into account. Not to overwhelm students with a high amount of data, only thirty were included in their worksheet (see the appendix for a copy of the worksheet). The concordance lines were retrieved from both the BNC online>³ and the Collins WordbanksOnline English corpus⁴corpora with which my students are familiar and, therefore, likely to use in the future. There were two criteria to select the concordance lines. First, no example of the word room was to be repeated. Therefore, various searches were carried out in both corpora to find out as many different examples of the use of room as possible. This criterion also allowed for the inclusion of examples where the word room had various functions (i.e. head of a premodified noun phrase, the premodifier of the head of another noun phrase), different meanings (i.e. literal and figurative) or is part of a collocation. This variety of examples was included to enrich the students' vocabulary and to make them become aware of possible patterns (collocations or colligations) of room. Thus, we could help them master one of the new parts of the official 'Certificate of Proficiency in English' Examination, which focuses on the use of the same word in different contexts. Second, the examples where the verbs that collocate with room appeared (i.e. rent, book, reserve, etc.) were disregarded, since students had been able to remember most of them in the previous brainstorming activity.

Following these two criteria, thirty concordance lines were selected. These could be divided into five different categories according to their lexico-grammatical characteristics:

i) Twenty examples referred to room as part of a building (e.g. staff room, waiting room, the dark front room, etc.). The function of room in these noun phrases is the head of the noun phrase.

ii) Four concordance lines had the meaning of space (e.g. shelf room, elbow room, etc.). Room is an uncountable noun in these examples and it may be premodified by adverbs such as less or more.

iii) The possibility of something existing or happening was conveyed in three examples (there is still much room for improvement, there is always room for doubt and this strange logic leaves little room for the subjective assessment of the product), where room is an uncountable word in the following grammatical patterns 'there is / sth leaves (postdeterminer) room for sth'.

iv) In two concordance lines there are examples of the use of the word room to characterize or describe something, thus functioning, in collocation in some cases, as a premodifier of the head of a noun phrase (at room temperature and room service).

v) Finally, we can find the collocation room and board, where room is in coordination.

Once the concordance lines were retrieved, they were jumbled up so that the types of rooms and the expressions denoting other meanings were not in order, and edited in KWIC format.

The activity was carried out in one hour and a half. First, students were reminded of the brainstorming done in the previous class where I elicited vocabulary related to tourism in general. Then, students were asked to write on a piece of paper all the examples (phrases or sentences) they could remember where the word room was used. Later, students exchanged examples in pairs and were asked to think about the use of the word room in their mother tongue, i.e. Spanish, and the possible translations into English.

The result of this brainstorming activity was that most of the students were able to remember types of rooms in a house (e.g. bathroom, bedroom, etc.), some types of rooms in a hotel (e.g. single room, twin room, etc.) and various types of room (e.g. motel room, hotel room, etc.) in English. They were also able to think about the Spanish for some types of rooms (habitación de relax, despensa, etc.), but failed to provide the appropriate translations into English. As a consequence, students were left with the feeling that they did not know how to say some types of room in English and they also became aware of their lack of intuition as to the possibility to express concepts (types of rooms, etc.) by means of postmodification or premodification. Just to mention a recurrent example, they asked which option (a room where you relax, a relaxation room, or a relaxing room) was more appropriate in English to express what they would say in their mother tongue as una habitación para relajarse or una habitación de relax.

While students were still thinking about the more native-like option, they were provided with the paper-based concordance lines. Then, the instructions to do the activity were outlined. First, they were reminded of the way of reading concordance lines and the importance of the immediate linguistic context (i.e. what they can find to the left and to the right of the key word) and of the situational context where the propositions could have been uttered or written. Second, they were asked to classify the thirty examples using as many categories as they needed, but providing a solid explanation for their defining criteria.

After a first moment of hesitation, my students began reading the concordance lines and classifying them into different categories. For them not to feel lost, I monitored the activity closely, individually encouraging them to do the classification, making them think about their criteria (without interfering in their classification process), solving some problems with vocabulary (not the ones closely related to the word room!), and making them feel confident and able to carry out such an analytic task.

The resulting twenty-four classifications were mainly semantic. However, one student (Student A in figure 1.) defined first her categories from a syntactic point of view, and then tried to label her categories semantically. A couple of students used a syntactic analysis to complete their classifications (see students D and F), but they only resorted to it as a complimentary way of improving the semantic classification.

Six out of the twenty-four classifications that students made are displayed in Figure 1. to exemplify the most frequent ones.

Figure 1. Students' classifications.

Regarding the first group of concordance lines, as stated in 4.2. above, two students (Students B and C), out of the twenty-one who analysed the use of the word room from a semantic point of view, defined their categories in detail, thus specifying in which type of building or context each room would be located. These two students, devised a much more fine-grained classification, while their classmates included those six (e.g. Student C) or eight sections (e.g. Student B) into two to four sections (e.g. Student D's 'parts of the house or public places' and 'kinds of room' or Student F's 'Rooms used to do some activities', 'kinds of room', 'specific rooms' and 'personal room'). It is worth mentioning that a few students ill-defined the categories in their classifications (e.g. Student E), resulting in fuzzy categories.

The other four categories posed more difficulties to students, as can be seen in their classifications. Some of them were able to recognize the meaning of space (e.g. Students A, C and D), while others included them under the umbrella categories 'idiomatic expressions', 'others' or used the syntactic analysis to account for them (e.g. Student E). As far as the third category is concerned, the concordance lines referring to possibility, only Student C was able to recognise those examples as different from the rest, even pointing out the postmodifying prepositional phrase introduced by for. As in the previous case, the rest of students included those examples in any of the umbrella categories. Similarly, categories four and five were also generally regarded in this category. The only difference is that Student D defined a group from a syntactic point of view (Room + noun) to include the examples in which room functions as the premodifier of the head of a noun phrase, and she also included the collocation room and board in her classification in the category 'expressions', while most students ignored this concordance line.

Once students finished their classifications, they were invited to write them down on the blackboard, which was divided into various sections for this purpose. Once the four volunteers finished, we compared them to highlight the main differences and similarities. In this way, students were able to analyse their own classifications in the light of their classmates' and see their different analytic skills, which helped them understand their different learning styles.

The comparison sparked off a thought-provoking class discussion of the results. On the one hand, the students who had approached the task from a semantic point of view realized that their classifications could benefit from the syntactic analysis and the students who had preferred the syntactic analysis noticed that the semantic analysis could also help them define several categories better. Therefore, the combination of both analyses was regarded as necessary. Monitoring this team work was just fascinating, since students were involved in a collaborative task where they were not only discussing in the foreign language but also using the necessary linguistic concepts to elaborate the 'final' classification. At the end, the students reached the conclusion that the concordance lines could be divided, at least, into the five categories mentioned in 4.1.

Only after the students had agreed on a classification did I provide them with photocopies of the pages where the word room appears in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (Crowther, 19955: 1020-1021) and The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations (Morton, 1997: 283). While reading these copies, students realized that the classifications done by lexicographers also included the main sense and the subsenses that they had classified in their categories: part of a building, space and purpose, and they realised that there were other contexts were room appeared that had not been covered in the concordance lines (for example, idioms such as be cramped for room / space or no room to swing a cat; or collocations with verbs, such as rent / room / reserve a room).

After this class, several conclusions can be reached. As far as the students' process of vocabulary acquisition, it seems clear that they have important gaps in vocabulary. Furthermore, they believe that knowing a word only means remembering its translation into their mother tongue (i.e. Spanish). No matter how many times they are explained that knowing a word in English means mastering its pronunciation, morphology, syntactic behaviour (collocations and colligations), context of use, etc. most of them would be happy with the translation only. Thanks to this type of activity, students have benefited from two main aspects. First, the students exposure to the authentic data in the concordance lines has improved their active and passive vocabulary in a short period of time, as checked in the next classes where many communicative activities on travelling and tourism were carried out. Second, students seem to have realized that a word may appear in various linguistic contexts having different senses. At least now, students may use the dictionary more effectively to increase their vocabulary.

Concerning the methodology, positive and negative aspects should be pointed out here. To begin with the negative ones, it was clear during the monitoring process that it is necessary to develop the students' analytical skills. It has already been highlighted that the key problem when University students work with corpora is their '[…] insufficient attentiveness in observation of the data or flawed reasoning […]' (Kennedy and Miceli, 2002: 190), fact which led my students to ill-defined categories or fuzzy distinctions between various uses of the word room. Therefore, students need training to carry out this type of exercise effectively and a wider knowledge of linguistics to describe the instances in the concordance lines appropriately. The close monitoring on the part of the teacher also proves to be crucial, since they would feel lost otherwise and would not achieve the task.
However, the activity also had many positive aspects. The first one is that it allowed students to face the data individually and collectively. When on their own, students struggled with the examples and had to think about the best classification of the concordance lines. Obviously, some students had more difficulties with this type of task than others and some spent more time doing the activity, but none of them failed to provide a classification. This encouraged them to use their analytical skills and reach a conclusion. When comparing their results in group, the students learnt from each other in a collaborative effort to design the final classification. Their strategies to complete the task were activated in a supportive context in which they felt that they had something to contribute. This engagement with the activity is in close connection with the second aspect that I would like to comment. On both occasions, when working individually and in a team, students were highly involved in the activity. It was surprising to me to see how they grew overexcited as they finished their classifications or frustrated when they found gaps in their reasoning. Even though I did not say anything about the classifications during my monitoring, I helped them think when doing the activity and guided them, but without biasing their results.

Both the positive and the negative aspects were commented by the students when asked their opinion about the activity that they had just done and how they felt about it. Some of them highlighted the possible drawbacks. For example, they felt the need for guidance and the feeling of being overwhelmed by many examples of authentic use of the foreign language:

'… if we are not given concrete commands, we can get lost…'
'I think this has been a kind of mess because I didn't know many of those uses…'

Among the positive aspects, students considered this activity 'interesting', 'entertaining', 'useful' and 'rewarding', because it allowed them to learn vocabulary without being spoonfed. In fact, some students wrote that 'when we learn English words in their context it is easier to remember them' and that they 'didn't know the English for many expressions that I have learnt today'. The discovery nature of the activity was also highlighted and seen as a better option than memorizing:

'… I have realised on my own what room means in different contexts'
'I feel well and clever because I have learnt so much in little time and in an amusing way.'
'… this method is a kind of searching. That is the reason why this method is more interesting than memorizing words like parrots.'
'… (some examples) were very strange to me, but I am sure they will remain in my mind'.

Finally, most students remarked that they would love to do this type of activity again in class:

'… I think that we should do more activities like this.'
'To my mind, we should do this more frequently.'
'I would like to practice this exercise again.'

And those students with computer skills suggested running concordances for other words related to the topic that we were studying in class (e.g. hotel, trip, etc.).
As a conclusion, the activity fulfilled the four objectives that I had in mind before carrying it out. First, it allowed students to realize that a word can appear in different contexts meaning different things, and, therefore, that '[…] knowing a foreign language word is not a 'yes or no' phenomenon.' (Lenko-Szymanska, 2002: 218). Second, students felt that they could face authentic data on their own and find out possible patterns, which they could analyse and use. Third, students were engaged in a learning activity that increased their self-esteem and motivation. Finally, they became aware of other resources, apart from dictionaries and grammars, that they have at their disposal to enhance their written command of the foreign language.

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Note:

¹ I refer here to corpus-based materials produced by native speakers (e.g. BNC, ICE, LOB, BROWN, etc.) not to non-native speaker corpora, that is, learner corpora (Granger, 1993). Undoubtedly, learner corpora can also be used in the classroom by means of DDL, as can be seen in the literature (see among others, Uzar, 1997; Flowerdew, 1998; Seidlhofer, 2002; Granger, 2004; Osborne, 2004; Sripicharn, 2004).

² During their two first years at University, my students have been encouraged to use grammars, dictionaries, thesaurus, etc. However, most of them are unfamiliar with the existence of web-based media, such as freely available online dictionaries or corpora online, from which they can benefit in their learning process.

³Available at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/.

⁴Available at http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx.

⁵Only to come across the main types of room, they would have had to read many texts to find most of the examples in the concordance lines.

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