Can Corpora Activities be Fun?
Ken Lackman, Canada
Ken Lackman is the Director of Studies at EF International Language School in Toronto. Previously, he spent seven years at the Caledonian School in Prague teaching and developing materials. His article "The Teacher as Input" appeared in English Teaching Professional last January. E-mail: ken.lackman@ef.com
Menu
Introduction
Identifying Patterns
Classroom Activity
Feedback from Students and...
Variations
Conclusion
What I remember most about my early attempts at using corpora in the classroom was the time my students complained while I was handing out concordance sheets to them. I had subjected them to these lists of obscure sentence fragments before and even though they were upper-intermediate students, they found the amount of data overwhelming and the assigned tasks to analyze the data tedious. Still, I remained convinced of the value of classroom corpora activities and began to ponder ways that I could make these activities more interesting and even fun for my students.
My first successful experiment came about when I was faced with constructing a lesson from a coursebook unit on art. It was not a particularly good coursebook and the page I was working with had provided only a handful of colour collocations which the students were to use to describe an impressionist painting. As it was an advanced class, I felt that learning the limited number of collocations provided would not be a challenging task for my students. Looking at the list, which included "nut brown", "chocolate brown" and "emerald green", I noticed that two of the collocations were created using nouns representing food. I suspected that this might be a common tendency. A quick corpora search with "NOUN+yellow" confirmed my suspicions.
e.g. pink for meat, |
yellow |
for pastries. 5 colours per |
grapes which resulted in heavy, |
yellow |
wines," he says. `But I don't |
[c] flower name [/c] [p] Light |
yellow |
foliage is bright all the year |
earthenware. Horizon Blue, Corn |
Yellow |
and Pistachio Green are just |
up. Pink things, blue things, |
yellow |
things, white things-don't ask |
in Barnes with its nicotine |
yellow |
walls could be in Milan. The |
carat, 18 carat or 22 carat |
yellow |
and white gold; or nine carat |
will turn the white of the eye |
yellow; |
anaemia can be spotted by |
from some sickly inner light, |
yellow |
-greenish. There was the stench |
before leaves on year-old wood. |
Yellow |
-green fruit. H60- 90cm/2-3ft, |
F2- 3. `Primavera", pale canary- |
yellow |
flowers, yellow-orange autumn |
forms include `Ferox Argentea", |
yellow |
and white leaf margins, and ` |
of densely packed, sulphur- |
yellow |
foliage, brighter in summer, |
9. C `Jenny Bloom". Soft butter- |
yellow |
flowers, strong-growing and |
Tight umbels of tiny, sulphur- |
yellow |
flowers set in leafy bracts, |
early spring to late autumn. |
Yellow, |
buttercup flowers are hardly |
on the beach, in a dry lemon- |
yellow |
sari, Sannasamma was a new |
library catalogues newspapers, |
Yellow |
Pages, recommendations from |
ranging from bright lemon |
yellow |
through to leafy green for |
turning the emblem of Ireland |
yellow |
and black, and the two main |
two to Australia in the TODAY/ |
Yellow |
Pages World Cup cricket |
green Rolls and the mustard- |
yellow |
1928 Austin, complete with |
condensed milk, 2 eggs dash |
yellow |
food colour. 1 large punnet |
as Lambrook Gold and Lambrook |
Yellow. |
[p] For brilliant colour it |
from the bosom of her canary |
yellow |
dress, which had a bold collar |
and produces double, egg-yolk- |
yellow |
blossoms that keep coming if |
a list of potential candidates: |
yellow |
flag [f] Iris pseudacorus), |
such as Roadway Services, |
Yellow |
Freight, and Carolina Freight |
grey, blue-biege, or buttercup |
yellow |
like the one already in |
blind to the fact that lemon |
yellow |
and pale pink are not good |
I was able to further verify this trend with other concordance lists where I replaced "yellow" with "brown", "green", "red" and "blue". I also noticed that there was a broader trend in creating colour collocations which related colours to things from the natural world. From the above list, this would include "canary-yellow", "buttercup yellow" and possibly "sulphur-yellow" and "nicotine yellow". At this point I had identified two trends in the creation of colour collocations, those named after food or drink and those named for things in the natural world. Out of curiosity I searched for the five colours preceded by an adjective instead of a noun and more trends were revealed.
a sequence: grey-pale, amber, |
brown, |
purple, green-lime, green- |
and the tongue coated yellow- |
brown. |
[h] Merc. Sol. [/h] [p] This |
and enjoy the melodies of Little |
Brown |
Jug, In The Mood, Moonlight |
available throughout this little |
brown |
book, because we thought you'd |
5 for 15-18min, or until golden |
brown |
and craggy in appearance. Cool |
has set underneath and is golden |
brown. |
Life the edges with a knife |
brunettes. My mother had light |
brown |
hair; my ex-wife is a |
fishing. On this stretch, wild |
brown |
trout, salmon, grayling and |
rods took 2,593 trout, the best |
brown |
4 lb 12 oz by Mick Wright, |
the bark is firm and greenish |
brown |
[p] Support tomatoes in |
and quite sickening pinkish |
brown; |
lang keeps meaning to have it |
we includes his head lad, Corky |
Brown |
Corky feeds to my work and I |
heat until crisp and golden |
brown. |
Using a fish slice, turn cake |
pocket, he had pinned a large |
brown |
button that said `Ted" in |
in their threadbare, grey- |
brown |
blankets. Two helicopters had |
by. The ground was full of muddy |
brown |
pools. Anna had pulled down |
face, white hair and opaque |
brown |
eyes, the doctor thought I |
becomes winter. The straight, |
brown |
stems of Calamagrostis x |
tossing her mane of glossy |
brown |
hair Hi, Anica. You're |
dressing in my tub for little |
brown |
jobs. It imitates the oliver |
all this in front of heavy black- |
brown |
furniture and to the |
she's really beautiful. Her deep |
brown |
eyes were haunted, empty. She |
together, the dry, reddish- |
brown |
substance flaked away in tiny |
his withdrawal behind a dirty |
brown |
cloud. The Iraqis had been |
neatly groomed, with her soft |
brown |
hair pulled austerely back |
a shortish fellow with a little |
brown |
moustache, and sharp little |
walk out in back of his small, |
brown |
house and down a trail. I take |
and a fiscal conservative. |
Brown |
just called himself cheap. |
wisdom to your home. His deep |
brown |
eyes cast an impenetrable gaze |
like sort of brownish or goldish |
brown |
colors. [c] picture [/c] [c] |
[p] JOHN MAJOR [p] HIS greeny- |
brown |
eyes (top picture) show he has a |
same, to a flipper - dull, mud- |
brown |
flounder and cod, swimming in |
was a skinny woman, with yellowy- |
brown |
skin and a pronounced |
Three new trends I picked out were collocations made up of two basic colours (black-brown), and combinations with "ish" or "y" (reddish-brown, greeny-brown). I then repeated this corpora search with the rest of my chosen colours. I found more examples and began to compile a list of target vocabulary for my class based on the noun and adjective groups I had identified.
As if I hadn't compiled enough collocations, I decided to repeat the corpora searches except with adjectives and nouns before the word "coloured" instead of a specific colour. The results indicated that the same trends appeared in those constructions.
wooded hillsides, sleepy honey- |
coloured |
villages, crumbling old |
porcelain enamel, then copper- |
coloured |
enamel that improves heat |
voluminous shoulder bag. Multi- |
coloured |
jungle print cotton, with |
cherries, preferably natural |
coloured |
[p] roughly crushed sugar |
and take a chair at a cream- |
coloured, |
linoleum-topped table. |
at room temperature. Light- |
coloured |
tahini - a ground sesame seed |
of corridors made of rose- |
coloured |
metal. Easy maintenance, but |
concealed behind wooden doors |
coloured |
with a paint mixed to a 17th |
WITH CAPTIONS [/c] 1 Stone- |
coloured |
paintwork throughout the |
of appetite, jaundice, clay- |
coloured |
faeces. [p] Prevention: |
British Birds), Wallace Dean |
(Coloured |
Canaries), Robin Haigh (Birds |
were soft but still multi- |
coloured |
with greens, blues and |
cottage, two storeys. |
Coloured |
porcelain flowers adorned |
chose black slacks and a rust- |
coloured |
blouse that enhanced the |
receipt of regular retainers. |
Coloured |
stars against each name |
into a flow of consciousness |
coloured |
and affected by accompanying |
But you're right." His voice |
coloured |
with learned contempt. `He is |
A mass [8] of straw- |
coloured |
hair fell untidily over his |
it. A woman dressed in mud- |
coloured |
robes screamed at him to stay |
of the globe was mushroom |
coloured. |
Inside, I saw the Persian |
from South America. Parchment- |
coloured |
palmyra fronds were stacked |
that looks like a massive skin- |
coloured |
breathable Elastoplast. On |
metamorphosed into a rainbow- |
coloured |
Mung Bean and Quark a-go-go. |
pealed out among its honey- |
coloured |
Georgian houses as the summer |
or black. Out on the piste, |
coloured |
poles should be spaced out |
me a mountain of blood-clot- |
coloured |
counters. The table was a |
Pretty dresses cut in flesh- |
coloured |
cottons were defined at the |
the keys to our terracotta- |
coloured |
villa she had been quick to |
could cash in on any multi |
coloured |
shirt worn by one of Europe's |
of the house would be cream |
coloured |
with shutters on the windows |
of ivory pine with a coffee- |
coloured |
inlay. From Habitat pound; |
I mean he used to have orangey |
coloured |
hair no no no. Got off the |
[tc text=pause] The light- |
coloured |
panelled side walls with |
more er er incoming of er er |
coloured |
people into this country and |
At this point I had printed out twelve concordance lists, the five colours and "coloured" preceded by nouns as well as adjectives. While scanning the lists, I made note of the collocations that fit into the categories I had chosen. I came up with the following chart:
Food and Drink |
Nature and People |
Two Colour Collocations |
coffee-coloured chocolate-brown nut-brown toffee-coloured cinnamon-brown honey-brown mustard-yellow lemon-yellow corn-yellow butter-yellow mint-green lime-green bottle-green ice-blue cherry-red wine-red beet-red honey-coloured wine-coloured peach-coloured cream-coloured champagne-coloured salmon-coloured tea-coloured wheat-coloured
|
mud-brown sunshine yellow forest-green sea-green moonlight blue sky blue baby blue ocean blue ice-blue blood red brick-red rose red rose-coloured flesh-coloured
|
green-yellow golden-yellow blue-green grey-green bronze-green yellow-green lilac-blue etc. |
With 'ish' |
greenish-blue greyish-blue bluish-green pinkish-red etc. |
With 'y' |
greeny-brown orangy-yellow rosy-red etc. |
Now that I had targeted the language for the lesson, the challenge was to come up with a motivating way for the students to extract the language from the concordance printouts. I considered an inductive approach where the students would have to go over the sheets and detect the trends I had identified, possibly with some guidance. If I hadn't had twelve sheets of sentence fragments, I might have used this approach. My previous experiments with using corpora in class taught me that I needed to strike a balance between the complexity of the task and the amount of data the students had to deal with. Finding patterns and then collocations that fit those patterns was too much for twelve concordance sheets. Instead, I decided to take a deductive approach, where the rule is first given and then applied to examples. Giving them the "rule" involved putting the chart headings (food and drink, etc.) on the whiteboard. Application of the "rule" involved the selection process where they had to go over the concordance sheets and pick out only the examples that fit the rule, or in this case, the patterns. I feel that this searching and selecting task still involves some degree of cognitive processing and is particularly suited to the nature of concordances.
I thought that the hunt for the collocations in the forest of data would be motivating but I wanted to take it one step further to try to make the task fun. I did this by making it competitive.
I told the students that it would be a race to see how many collocations they could find. They were put into pairs and each pair was given a different coloured board marker. The concordance sheets remained on my desk and they were told to come up, take one sheet and write the collocations they found on it in the appropriate columns on the whiteboard. Once they finished with one sheet, they returned it and took another. They were told that they would be awarded one point for every correct collocation they wrote up on the board but that if they wrote down a collocation that had already been put up on the board, they would lose a point. This task kept them moving around the classroom and the chart filled up in a relatively short time. Once this was done, I eliminated any collocations which did not belong (there were very few) or ones that were repeated and we counted up the scores for each pair according to the colour of their marker. After a brief clarification stage, the students practiced using the collocations to describe a selection of postcard art reproductions.
In this lesson, the students actually enjoyed working with the concordances. They were not overwhelmed by the amount of data because they could usually ignore the words on each line which did not pertain to the collocation. They liked scanning for words which appeared to fit the categories and that it was competitive. Some of them said that they sometimes looked at the rest of the line when they were unsure if it actually was a colour collocation. For example, in the excerpts below, a look at the context reveals that even though the colours appear to be associated with nature, they are not colour collocations.
we includes his head lad, Corky Brown Corky feeds to my work and I
will turn the white of the eye yellow; anaemia can be spotted by
Actually I planned this lesson when I was doing the DELTA course, and after my instructor informed me that the lesson had passed, he told me that a lesson with fifty targeted items was way beyond normal limits and usually meant automatic failure. However, he had not told me this before the lesson because he believed that it would work. The reason it worked was that even though there were over fifty collocations, conceptually there were only five, and those five types were made up of words that the students already knew. What they learned were the patterns and some examples that fit the patterns.
I've used the activity described above with concordance sheets featuring other types of collocations. Sometimes instead of listing the pattern categories on the board, I'll write them on large sheets of paper which I put up around the classroom. This gets students moving around even more and avoids congestion at the board. When I do this, I usually stipulate that the students cannot write two examples in a row on a paper. This makes the activity even more active. In some cases, I've asked the students to cross off each collocation on the concordance as they select it and then return the paper to the teacher's desk so another pair can search for others on that page.
The tendency the students have to ignore words which are unfamiliar to them and to not concern themselves with surrounding words suggests that the activity could be used with lower-level learners. With any authentic materials, usefulness at lower levels depends on the task chosen. The scanning activity would work if the students were only required to pick out collocations created with words they already knew. For example, a corpus search for adjectives that follow "a" and precede "day" produces some very common adjectives: good, long, nice, great, hard, bad, busy, lovely, sad, rainy, sunny, fine, hot, cold, etc.
Something that my DELTA instructor said after my collocation lesson has always stuck with me. In an attempt to be self-critical following a lesson that I knew had gone well, I mentioned that I had heard a student use the expression "apple green" during the productive activity. I complained that it was not on my list and furthermore was not a collocation that was actually used. The instructor said that I had missed the point. Rather than demonstrating a flaw in my teaching, her creation proved that she had understood the concept and was confident enough to apply it in her own way. I believe that her creativity was at least partly inspired by an awareness of the variety, flexibility and range of language that the corpus search illustrated.
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