Selected Bibliography and Resources for Further Information
Using Concordances from Small Corpora: Video Transcripts and Newspapers
Bill Pellowe, billp@gol.com
Kitakyushu JALT: May 8th, 1999, 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m., at Seinan Jogakuin
Kagoshima JALT: June 26, 1999, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m., at Shigakukan University

Today, I mentioned that I have the Totoro transcript on-line, as well as an accurate translation of the Japanese version of the video. You can find these at http://www2.gol.com/users/billp/totoro

A recent collection of articles covering practical, pedagogical and research-oriented applications of corpora ("corpora" is the plural form of "corpus")
Wichmann, A., S. Fligelstone, T. McEnery & G. Knowles (eds), 1997, Teaching and language corpora. Longman.

This collection of short, practical activities contains a section on concordancing activities (pp. 253- 275):
Boswood, T. (ed), 1997, New Ways of Using Computers in Language Teaching. TESOL Publications.

The following book from OUP contains a small number of activities for concordancers, but please note the publication date. I'd recommend you get the Wichman et al and Boswood books instead.
Hardisty, D. & S. Windeatt, 1988, CALL. Oxford University Press.

Other books cited today for were:
Carter, R., 1987, Vocabulary: Applied Linguistic Perspective. Routledge.
Carter, R. & M. McCarthy, 1988, Vocabulary and Language Teaching. Longman.
Sinclair, J. (ed), 1990, English Grammar. (reference book) Collins COBUILD: HarperCollins Publishers.
Willis, D., 1990, The Lexical Syllabus. Collins COBUILD: HarperCollins Publishers.
Willis, J. & D. Willis (eds), 1996, Challenge and Change in Language Teaching. Heinemann.

[For the origin of term collocation, see Carter & McCarthy, 1988, p. 32.]

For an analysis of non-native speakers' collocational competence, see Howarth, P., 1998, "Phraseology and Second Language Proficiency", Applied Linguistics, 19:1, 24-44.
Also in the same issue of AL is an article on verbs sharing a pattern fall into groups based on meanings. Hunston, S. & G. Francis, 1998, "Verbs Observed: A Corpus-driven Pedagogic Grammar", Applied Linguistics, 19:1, 45-72. For a related yet less technical overview, see Hunston, S., G. Francis & E. Manning, 1997, "Grammar and Vocabulary: Showing the Connections", in ELT Journal, 51:3, pp. 208-216.

Tim Johns was one of the first to advocate using concordances with language learners. His "Data-driven Learning Page" is a rich source of information and a full bibliography of work in this area: http://sun1.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/timconc.htm

Below are listed three articles of particular relevance which I'd like to draw your attention to; they are available on-line on Tim Johns' site:

A study on using concordancers with Japanese students:
Hadley, Gregory, forthcoming, 'Sensing the Winds of Change: An Introduction to Data-driven Learning'. To appear in Insights 2.
http://sun1.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/winds.htm

"Concordancing with Language Learners: Why? When? What?", Vance Stevens
http://sun1.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/stevens.htm

Also Tribble (1997), see "English for special purposes", below.

English for special purposes:
Collecting texts which are specialized to a particular field, and performing analysis on them.

Tribble, Chris, 1997, "Improvising Corpora for ELT: Quick and Dirty Ways of Developing Corpora for Language Teaching"
http://sun1.bham.ac.uk/johnstf/palc.htm
Tribble describes how he has "been able to construct themed, twenty to thirty-thousand word micro-corpora in fifteen to twenty minutes. Although such a corpus sounds insignificantly tiny when compared with the huge corpora which can now be accessed, I would argue that if one wishes to investigate the lexis of a particular content domain (e.g. health) a specialist micro-corpus can be more often be useful than a much larger general corpus. For example. in the written component of the BNC Sampler (1,000,000 words) there are no instances of "cancers". An Encarta® micro-corpus of health articles (24,805 words) gives 33 usefully contextualised examples! "

Carlson, David, 1999, "Creating Word Freqency Lists for Specific Purposes". The Language Teacher, pp. 5-8.
Note that Carlson does not use a concordancing program, but he uses other software to get the data which CONC can provide, and he recommends further applications which CONC can perform. Carlson teaches English to first and second year dental students. Because these dental students are not yet well into their dental studies, the English language textbooks and resources for dentists were too specialized for his students. Using articles from on-line resouces for dentists, he created a 25,000 word corpus. Text analysis tools helped him isolate the most common dental-related vocabulary. He notes that these lists would be useful as a key word file for concordancing, and he cites Thurston, J. & Candlin, C., 1998, "Concordancing and the teaching of the vocabulary of academic English", in English for Specific Purposes, 17(3), 267-280.


Another relevant article from The Language Teacher is available on-line: Willis, D., 1997, "Lexical Phrases in Syllabus and Materials Design"
http://langue.hyper.chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/tlt/97/sep/willis.html

Concordancing Software

Concordancing software for Macintosh:
CONC is the software we used today. CONC's homepage is www.sil.org/computing/conc.

Another concorcancer for Mac is MonoConc www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/mono.html. A free hypercard program, shareware only in the sense that donations are accepted, not required.

What are the difference between the two? Compared to CONC, MonoConc is slower and not as easy to use initially. Furthermore, while CONC can generate a complete concordance of a text, MonoConc forces you to specify a search criteria (like, for example, a single word). However, if you have a specific search in mind, MonoConc can generate a collocations frequency listing of items positioned 3, 2 and 1 item(s) to the right and left of the target item. CONC is limited to 1 item to the right.

(Note that the Windows demo version of MonoConc is a superior program to the Mac version of MonoConc. While a full-strength commercial Mac program was supposed to be forthcoming, the author informed me that it's becoming increasingly difficult to find affordable Macintosh programmers. )
Concordancing software for Windows:
WordSmith Tools Version 3.0 (Oxford University Press) at www.oup.co.uk/elt/catalogu/multimed/4589846/4589846.html for details and an overview. You can download a demo version.

A demo verson of MonoConc for Windows is available via a link from www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/mono.html. This demo version is full-strength except that you can only do searches for words beginning with the letter L.

"Concordance" is a concordancer and it also makes web-based concordancer pages (so you get a frames-based page which acts like CONC). http://www.rjcw.freeserve.co.uk/


Do a simple search of the British National Corpus from http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html. You can enter your search terms directly from the page, and the results of your search will be displayed shortly thereafter. This is online as a sampler of the BNC, so there are two restrictions to the output: first, you are only given up to 50 results, and second, the results include only the full sentences which contain your search items (so you cannot backtrack to view the contexts, which puts you at a disadvantage if searching for items such as "be that as it may").

Text Resources