Learning words right with the Sketch Engine and WebBootCat: Meaningful lexical acquisition from corpora and the web

Simon Smith; Scott Sommers; Adam Kilgarriff

Learning words right with the Sketch Engine and WebBootCat: Meaningful lexical acquisition from corpora and the web

Simon Smith, Scott Sommers, Adam Kilgarriff

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

Abstract

In Taiwan, and other Asian countries, students of English expect and are expected to memorize a lot of vocabulary: Ming Chuan University, for example, relies fairly heavily on vocabulary acquisition and retention in its teaching and testing resources. Oftentimes, lists of vocabulary items to be learned by students do not really belong to a particular topic, or fit it very loosely, because the items have not been chosen in a principled way. The present paper reviews the arguments for incidental learning and direct learning of vocabulary in ELT, and shows how a web corpus builder (WebBootCat [Lexical Computing, Ltd., n.d.]) can be used to build lists of words that are related to a particular topic in an intuitive and statistically principled way. A small number of seed search terms are used by WebBootCat to generate a corpus of texts on a given topic, and this corpus is searched to find vocabulary items that are salient to the topic.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	CamTESOL Conference on English Language Teaching: Selected Papers
Pages	28-42
Volume	4
Publication status	Published - 2008
Event	CamTESOL Conference on English Language Teaching - Phnom Penh, Cambodia Duration: 23 Feb 2008 → 23 Feb 2008

Conference

Conference	CamTESOL Conference on English Language Teaching
Country/Territory	Cambodia
City	Phnom Penh
Period	23/02/08 → 23/02/08

Bibliographical note

This paper was given at the CamTesol Conference on English Language Teaching, 2008, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The conference proceedings are available in full text under a CC BY-SA <creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB> license at: http://www.camtesol.org/Download/Earlier_Publications/Selected_Papers_Vol.4_2008.pdf

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Smith, S, Sommers, S & Kilgarriff, A 2008, Learning words right with the Sketch Engine and WebBootCat: Meaningful lexical acquisition from corpora and the web. in CamTESOL Conference on English Language Teaching: Selected Papers. vol. 4, pp. 28-42, CamTESOL Conference on English Language Teaching, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 23/02/08. <http://www.camtesol.org/Download/Earlier_Publications/Selected_Papers_Vol.4_2008.pdf>

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title = "Learning words right with the Sketch Engine and WebBootCat: Meaningful lexical acquisition from corpora and the web",

abstract = "In Taiwan, and other Asian countries, students of English expect and are expected to memorize a lot of vocabulary: Ming Chuan University, for example, relies fairly heavily on vocabulary acquisition and retention in its teaching and testing resources. Oftentimes, lists of vocabulary items to be learned by students do not really belong to a particular topic, or fit it very loosely, because the items have not been chosen in a principled way. The present paper reviews the arguments for incidental learning and direct learning of vocabulary in ELT, and shows how a web corpus builder (WebBootCat [Lexical Computing, Ltd., n.d.]) can be used to build lists of words that are related to a particular topic in an intuitive and statistically principled way. A small number of seed search terms are used by WebBootCat to generate a corpus of texts on a given topic, and this corpus is searched to find vocabulary items that are salient to the topic.",

author = "Simon Smith and Scott Sommers and Adam Kilgarriff",

note = "This paper was given at the CamTesol Conference on English Language Teaching, 2008, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The conference proceedings are available in full text under a CC BY-SA <creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB> license at: http://www.camtesol.org/Download/Earlier_Publications/Selected_Papers_Vol.4_2008.pdf; CamTESOL Conference on English Language Teaching ; Conference date: 23-02-2008 Through 23-02-2008",

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pages = "28--42",

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AU - Sommers, Scott

AU - Kilgarriff, Adam

N1 - This paper was given at the CamTesol Conference on English Language Teaching, 2008, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The conference proceedings are available in full text under a CC BY-SA <creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB> license at: http://www.camtesol.org/Download/Earlier_Publications/Selected_Papers_Vol.4_2008.pdf

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N2 - In Taiwan, and other Asian countries, students of English expect and are expected to memorize a lot of vocabulary: Ming Chuan University, for example, relies fairly heavily on vocabulary acquisition and retention in its teaching and testing resources. Oftentimes, lists of vocabulary items to be learned by students do not really belong to a particular topic, or fit it very loosely, because the items have not been chosen in a principled way. The present paper reviews the arguments for incidental learning and direct learning of vocabulary in ELT, and shows how a web corpus builder (WebBootCat [Lexical Computing, Ltd., n.d.]) can be used to build lists of words that are related to a particular topic in an intuitive and statistically principled way. A small number of seed search terms are used by WebBootCat to generate a corpus of texts on a given topic, and this corpus is searched to find vocabulary items that are salient to the topic.

AB - In Taiwan, and other Asian countries, students of English expect and are expected to memorize a lot of vocabulary: Ming Chuan University, for example, relies fairly heavily on vocabulary acquisition and retention in its teaching and testing resources. Oftentimes, lists of vocabulary items to be learned by students do not really belong to a particular topic, or fit it very loosely, because the items have not been chosen in a principled way. The present paper reviews the arguments for incidental learning and direct learning of vocabulary in ELT, and shows how a web corpus builder (WebBootCat [Lexical Computing, Ltd., n.d.]) can be used to build lists of words that are related to a particular topic in an intuitive and statistically principled way. A small number of seed search terms are used by WebBootCat to generate a corpus of texts on a given topic, and this corpus is searched to find vocabulary items that are salient to the topic.

M3 - Chapter

VL - 4

SP - 28

EP - 42

BT - CamTESOL Conference on English Language Teaching: Selected Papers

T2 - CamTESOL Conference on English Language Teaching

Y2 - 23 February 2008 through 23 February 2008

ER -

Learning words right with the Sketch Engine and WebBootCat: Meaningful lexical acquisition from corpora and the web

Abstract

Conference

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