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Humanising Language Teaching
Humanising Language Teaching
Humanising Language Teaching
IDEAS FROM THE CORPORA

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

Introduction

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.

Identifying Patterns

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.

Classroom Activity

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.

Feedback from Students and...

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.

Variations

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.

Conclusion

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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