A visit to Halifax, or a visit in Halifax? Opening doors to language - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Aug 23, 2023 162 likes •560 views

A visit to Halifax, or a visit in Halifax? Opening doors to language through learners dictionaries and corpus-based resources Monideepa Chowdhury, Lianjing Li, Huan (Lucy) Lu, Ruolin Zhang, and Sandra Powell What is a learners dictionary?

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A visit to Halifax, or a visit in Halifax?

Opening doors to language through learners’ dictionaries and corpus-based resources Monideepa Chowdhury, Lianjing Li, Huan (Lucy) Lu, Ruolin Zhang, and Sandra Powell

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What is a learners’ dictionary?

For language learners
Definitions are not “dictionary-like”: more natural
A limited core vocabulary used for definitions and example

sentences

Example sentences showing how words are used
Some information about grammar patterns
Pronunciation information: IPA and/or sound files

Sandra Powell

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Two online learners’ dictionaries

Merriam-Webster

http://learnersdictionary.com/
Definitions use 3000-word

vocabulary base

2-5 example sentences for

most meanings of most words

Pronunciation: IPA and

sound file for American pronunciation.

Can save words looked up;

personal vocab. list/ dictionary

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

https://www.ldoceonline.com/
Definitions use 2000- word

vocabulary base

3-5 example sentences for most

meanings of most words. Common collocations. Corpus.

Pronunciation: IPA and sound files

for British and American pronunciation

Grammar boxes and thesaurus

boxes with information keyed to language learners

Sandra Powell

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What is a corpus?

A (language) corpus is a collection of texts, written or (transcribed)

spoken.

In 2018, corpora are electronic searchable databases containing millions of

words of authentic language in use.

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging: Words in the texts are “tagged” with a POS.

We can search for things like: Any preposition + “here”; Noun “visit” + any preposition

Lemma tagging: all inflected forms of a word are linked through tagging

We can search for things like: Any form of “be” (is/am/are/was/were/be/been/being) + “consisted”; Any form of “insist” (insists/insisted/insist/ insisting) + “on”

Sandra Powell

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COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English)

560 million words
Texts from 1990-2017; roughly 20 million words from each year
U.S. sources
Roughly equal amounts of text from 5 genres:

Spoken, radio + TV (transcribed speech) Popular magazines Newspapers Fiction Academic journals

Limited free online access
To search COCA: https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Comparison of COCA with other online corpora (and links to those corpora):

https://corpus.byu.edu/

Sandra Powell

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Using these resources to answer questions about how words are used

When you hear or read something

that sounds wrong to you, and you wonder if it’s an accepted usage

When you want good example

sentences to help in teaching vocabulary

When you are curious about how

the English-speaking world uses words in phrases and sentences!

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“insist”

Ruolin Zhang 11/17/2018

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Ruolin Zhang

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Ruolin Zhang

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Ruolin Zhang

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Ruolin Zhang

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Ruolin Zhang

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Questions?

How would you teach a verb

like “insist”? Would you prefer to give your learners a list and ask them to memorize it? Would you prefer to give them fish compared to teach them how to fish?

Ruolin Zhang

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In Here !

Grammatical? Or A slang?

Monideepa Chowdhury

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learners' dictionary: www.ldoceonline.com

Monideepa Chowdhury

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Yes! It is grammatical .

Monideepa Chowdhury

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Monideepa Chowdhury

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A question

Do you have any expressions that you know are grammatical, but you can’t accept them, because you still DON’T LIKE THEM?

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Disagreement on the use of “consist” ? The test is consisted of 4 parts.

Lianjing Li

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Two online learners’ dictionaries

Lianjing Li

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Usage frequency of both voices from COCA

Lianjing Li

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Usage frequency of both voices from COCA

Lianjing Li

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Usage frequency of both voices from COCA

Lianjing Li

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Usage frequency of both voices from COCA

Lianjing Li

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A question about referring to a corpus

How many examples do we need as the evidence of using an expression?

Lianjing Li

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I am enjoying my visit in Canada.
I am enjoying my vacation/my stay/ my time IN

Canada.

Huan (Lucy) Lu

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Huan (Lucy) Lu

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Huan (Lucy) Lu

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visit to

Huan (Lucy) Lu

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Huan (Lucy) Lu

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Huan (Lucy) Lu

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Huan (Lucy) Lu

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Translate and Compared

I’m enjoying my visit in

Canada.

In Mandarin,“in”as a

symbol relates to the present progressive tense;

I enjoyed my visit to

Canada.

In Mandarin，“to” as a

symbol relates to the simple past tense or the past perfect Tense.

Huan (Lucy) Lu

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Could you find any examples in the language you know where L1 grammar impacts L2 grammar learning?

Huan (Lucy) Lu

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Questions for discussion: When you teach patterns after verbs (like “want to do” but “insist

n doing”), would you prefer to give your learners a list and ask

them to memorize it? Would you prefer to give them fish compared to teach them how to fish? Do you have any expressions that you know are grammatical, but you can’t accept them, because you still DON’T LIKE THEM? How many examples do we need as the evidence of using an expression? (like “the test is consisted of 4 parts”) Could you find any examples in the language you know where L1 grammar impacts L2 grammar learning? Do you have any questions for us about how we used the dictionaries and corpus to research our questions?

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