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The Academic Collocation List – A tool for teaching academic English

The Academic Collocation List – A tool for teaching academic English. Kirsten Ackermann IATEFL 2012, Glasgow. Contents. 1. Motivation for the Academic Collocation List The importance of collocation knowledge 2. The Compilation of the Academic Collocation List Corpus Methodology Results

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The Academic Collocation List – A tool for teaching academic English

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  1. The Academic Collocation List – A tool for teaching academic English • Kirsten Ackermann • IATEFL 2012, Glasgow

  2. Contents • 1. Motivation for the Academic Collocation List • The importance of collocation knowledge • 2. The Compilation of the Academic Collocation List • Corpus • Methodology • Results • 3. Collocational Usage and Academic English Proficiency • 4. Teaching with the Academic Collocation List • Teaching learning strategies • Explicit teaching • Furthering inductive learning The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  3. 1 Motivation for the Compilation of the Academic Collocation List The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  4. What is a collocation? • Words are typically associated with other words in systematic ways. These ‘collocations’ are part of the extended meaning of a word. (Firth, 1952) • Collocations are associations between two words, so that the words co-occur more frequently than expected by chance. (Biber & Conrad, 1999) • Collocation is the tendency of words to be biased in the way they co-occur. (t-score & MI score) (Hunston, 2002) • Collocations are arbitrarily restricted word combinations made up of more than one word and lexically and/or semantically fixed to a certain extent. (Nesselhauf, 2005) The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  5. The importance of collocational knowledge • Collocational knowledge has a central role in efficient language acquisition and proficient language production. • As linguists such as Sinclair have demonstrated, a language can neither be adequately understood nor fluently produced on a word-by-word or purely grammar-focused basis. • Traditional grammar-based approaches to material design and language teaching often fail to acknowledge this. The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  6. 2 The Compilation of the Academic Collocation List The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  7. P I C A E WRITTEN SPOKEN Curricular Curricular Textbooks Articles Lectures Seminars Extracurricular Extracurricular Administrative material Broadcasts University/student/ alumni magazines Miscellaneous Employment and career information The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  8. PICAE: Written curricular component • 333 documents • From 4 academic disciplines: Humanities, Social Science, Natural and Formal Science, Professions and Applied Science • Covering 28 academic subjects: 7 subjects per academic discipline The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  9. PICAE: Academic disciplines and subjects The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  10. Methodology • The ACL was developed in four stages: • Computational analysis of the written curricular component of PICAE • Refinement of the data-driven list based on quantitative parameters and target part-of-speech combinations • Expert review to judge whether each collocation is pedagogically relevant • Systematisation of the list The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  11. Results The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  12. 3 Collocational Usage and Academic English Proficiency The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  13. Research Project: Investigating the use of academic vocabulary and its effect on test taker performance in the Pearson Test of English (PTE) Academic Research question: Is there a difference in quality, frequency and/or range of the academic words and collocations used by the different proficiency groups? The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  14. Academic vocabulary use in PTE Academic Write Essay Amongst others, knowing a word productively means being able to use it with words that commonly occur with it. (cf. Nation, 2001, pp. 26-28) The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  15. Collocation use containing AWL words: Write EssayHigh proficiency The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  16. Collocation use containing AWL words: Write Essay Medium proficiency The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  17. Collocation use containing AWL words: Write Essay Low proficiency The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  18. Findings • There is a strong correspondence between a test taker’s proficiency in academic writing and their academic vocabulary use. • PTE Academic tests academic English. There is a high correlation between prompt and responses in terms of the use of academic tokens. • More academic words seem to be relevant to learners than covered by the AWL. • Academic words seem to appear as a central element of collocations rather than ‘on their own’. The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  19. 4 Teaching with the Academic Collocation List The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  20. Teaching collocations I • 1. Teaching suitable learning strategies • Enabling learners to independently develop their collocational knowledge beyond the classroom • 2. Explicit teaching of new collocations • Using a variety of activities suitable for the collocation type and the ability of the students • 3. Furthering inductive learning • Usingconcordance lines and dictionaries entries of a particular collocation to illustrate its form and its use in context The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  21. Teaching learning strategies • Encourage students to do the following: • Treating collocations as single blocks of language • Being aware of collocations, and recognising them when seeing or hearing them • Reading as much as possible to learn vocabulary and collocations in context • Revising regularly and practising using new collocations in context as soon as possible after learning them • Learning collocations in groups that work for the individual student, e.g. alphabetically; by part-of-speech combinations or by a particular word • Using information on collocations in learner's dictionary and collocations dictionaries The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  22. Teaching learning strategies • When working with collocation cards • Writing each collocation on a card with its translation on the other side so that there has to be active retrieval of its form or meaning • Repeating the collocation aloud while memorising it • Spacing the repetitions so that there is an increasingly greater interval between learning sessions • Using mnemonic tricks putting the collocation into a sentence, and visualising examples of its meaning • Changing the order of the collocation cards to avoid serial learning • (adopted from Nation, 2001: 343) The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  23. Teaching collocations II • 1. Teaching suitable learning strategies • Enabling learners to independently develop their collocational knowledge beyond the classroom • 2. Explicit teaching of new collocations • Using a variety of activities to suitable for the collocation type and the ability of the students • 3. Furthering inductive learning • Usingconcordance lines and dictionaries entries of a particular collocation to illustrate its form and its use in context The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  24. Teaching collocations III • 1. Teaching suitable learning strategies • Enabling learners to independently develop their collocational knowledge beyond the classroom • 2. Explicit teaching of new collocations • Using a variety of activities to suitable for the collocation type and the ability of the students • 3. Furthering inductive learning • Usingconcordance lines and dictionaries entries of a particular collocation to illustrate its form and its use in context The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  25. Furthering inductive learning • 1. Data-driven learning (DDL) • Where the learner becomes a language researcher (inductive, self-directed language learning of advanced usage) • Target learner: advanced, sophisticated language learners in higher education • Identify-classify-generalise • 2. Using learner’s / collocation dictionaries • Serving as a bridge between traditional classroom practice and more demanding DDL • Having the potential to be used as tools for certain types of inductive learning, e.g. in combination with concordance lines The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  26. Working with concordance lines • Discovering grammar rules • Differentiating near synonyms • Extending knowledge about words already known • Increasing pattern awareness • Learning about collocation, colligation, morphology, frequency, • typicality, register, text type, discourse, style The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  27. Furthering inductive learning • 1. Data-driven learning (DDL) • Where the learner becomes a language researcher (inductive, self-directed language learning of advanced usage) • Target learner: advanced, sophisticated language learners in higher education • Identify-classify-generalise • 2. Using learner’s / collocation dictionaries • Serving as a bridge between traditional classroom practice and more demanding DDL • Having the potential to be used as tools for certain types of inductive learning, e.g. in combination with concordance lines The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  28. The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  29. Conclusion: An Academic Collocation List • Helping students from all academic disciplines increase their collocational competence and thus their language proficiency • Assisting EAP teachers in their lesson planning • Informing test development, i.e. item writing, item type, item analysis • Providing a research tool for investigating the development of academic language proficiency The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  30. David Crystal"An interesting list indeed. I saw my academic life passing before my eyes. You have captured academic hedging very well ('largely combined, almost certainly, almost completely, relatively easily, highly unlikely...'), (…). It's good to see the genre characterized so well (…)."Lord Randolph Quirk"What splendidly sophisticated thought has gone into the Collocations project: I am full of admiration for all who've been involved." The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

  31. kirsten.ackermann@pearson.com Acknowledgments: Douglas Biber & Bethany Gray for the computational analysis David Crystal, David Leech, Lord Randolph Quirk, Diane Schmitt & Della Summers for being on the expert panel Yu-Hua Chen, Chris Fox & Mike Mayor for being part of the team Thankyou The Academic Collocation List l 22 March 2012

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