AESLA Round Table

1. AESLA Round Table DDL and Key Word Patterning Mike Scott, Aston University 4 May 2011

2. Key Word Patterning

3. Emphases • Tim Johns and Data-Driven Learning • Mental processes in using the corpus

4. Learner perspective • “there is the pedagogic danger that one may, by making the program more powerful, be giving the machine tasks to do that should be left to the learner. For example, even if it were possible within the memory imitations of the microcomputer to do so, it would be of dubious benefit to offer the learner the standard option of mainframe concordancing packages for printing out a complete concordance for every word in the text or texts. Not only would learners easily be overwhelmed by the amount of printout generated, but the option would remove from them the crucial decision of deciding which word or words to investigate.” • Tim Johns, 1986:156.

5. Learner perspective • “there is the pedagogic danger that one may, by making the program more powerful, be giving the machine tasks to do that should be left to the learner. For example, even if it were possible within the memory imitations of the microcomputer to do so, it would be of dubious benefit to offer the learner the standard option of mainframe concordancing packages for printing out a complete concordance for every word in the text or texts. Not only would learners easily be overwhelmed by the amount of printout generated, but the option would remove from them the crucial decision of deciding which word or words to investigate.” • Tim Johns, 1986:156.

6. Points 1 & 2 • Identify features of interest • Avoid excessive complexity

7. KWIC • Viewed as ‘intake’ for language learning (Corder, 1967), a KWIC concordance occupies an intermediate position between the highly organized, graded, and idealized language of the typical coursebook, and the potentially confusing but far richer and more revealing ‘full flood’ of authentic communication. By concentrating and making it easy to compare the contexts within which a particular item occurs, it organizes data in a way that encourages and facilitates inference and generalization. (Tim Johns, 1986:159)

8. KWIC • Viewed as ‘intake’ for language learning (Corder, 1967), a KWIC concordance occupies an intermediate position between the highly organized, graded, and idealized language of the typical coursebook, and the potentially confusing but far richer and more revealing ‘full flood’ of authentic communication. By concentrating and making it easy to compare the contexts within which a particular item occurs, it organizes data in a way that encourages and facilitates inference and generalization. (Tim Johns, 1986:159)

9. Point 3 • Encourage inference and generalisation

10. A concordance is […] very different from the conventional constructed exercise in which the learner is searching for a single ‘correct’ answer […] in practice, such exercises often fail to promote effective learning since for a particular learner or group of learners the task is too easy (in which case the most the exercise can achieve is to remind the learner of what he or she knows already), or too difficult (when […] the most that the learner can do is to learn the correct answer by heart once it has been revealed). The concordance is inherently more open and more flexible. Without questions given in advance, it leads the learner to generate his or her own questions, and to test them out against the evidence. • Johns (1986:159-160)

11. A concordance is […] very different from the conventional constructed exercise in which the learner is searching for a single ‘correct’ answer […] in practice, such exercises often fail to promote effective learning since for a particular learner or group of learners the task is too easy (in which case the most the exercise can achieve is to remind the learner of what he or she knows already), or too difficult (when […] the most that the learner can do is to learn the correct answer by heart once it has been revealed). The concordance is inherently more open and more flexible. Without questions given in advance, it leads the learner to generate his or her own questions, and to test them out against the evidence. (159-160)

12. Point 4 • Generate your own suppositions

13. Tim Johns’ DDL Procedure • The basic procedure I teach for concordance-based learning research is "Identify - Classify - Generalise". Johns (1991: 4) • identify most common pattern (convince mostly followed by that); • classify (convince is followed by relative clause) • generalise (use convince … that but persuade … to)

14. See also • Tim Johns’ Kibbitzers • lexically.net/TimJohns/index.html

15. Example • Primary school children

16. Thinking in Colour • Year 4 and Year 5 children (age 8-10), Southampton

17. Noticing

18. Thinking

19. Points 5-7 • Colour • Noticing • Thinking

20. Strategies for noticing

21. Point 8 • Scan vertically

22. Word Clouds

23. Point 9 • Show overall view plus focussed detail amet

24. Dispersion plots • here sorted by first appearance in the novel Bleak House

25. Point 10 • Represent word-position by plot-mark • Then sort all the data as appropriate text transformation

26. Conclusions • Users: • Mental Operations: • identifying, classifying, inference, generalisation, noticing, suppositions • Strategies • Scan vertically • Sort data thinking

27. Conclusions • Teacher or Software Designer Strategies • Avoid complexity, use colour • Give overall view plus focussed detail • Transform data: text becomes word-position plot-marks

28. Johns, T. MicroConcord: A Language learner’s research tool. System, Vol 14 No. 2, 151-162. • Johns, T. 1991. “Should you be Persuaded – Two samples of data-driven learning materials”, in Tim Johns & Philip King, 1991 (eds) “Classroom Concordancing”. ELR Journal Vol. 4. 1-16. • Thompson, Paul & Alison Sealey, 2004, An investigation into corpus-based learning about language in the primary school. ESRC Research Award R000223900. Available via http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/ll/app_ling/internal/sst.htm