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Title: Learning and Teaching the Phraseology of English


1
Learning and Teaching the Phraseology of English
  • 2005-08/LTG/SS/ENGL2

2
Project objectives
  • Enhance teachers and students critical
    awareness of the nature and role of phraseology
    in language.
  • Design an innovative computer-mediated and
    corpus-driven learning and teaching methodology
    that facilitates the study of phraseology in
    English texts.
  • Design and implement innovative learning and
    teaching activities that highlight key elements
    in the understanding and production of
    phraseology in English texts and which can be
    replicated in the most relevant and appropriate
    applied language studies and English proficiency
    subjects.
  • Enhance students critical and creative thinking
    through the understanding, analysis, comparison
    and application of phraseology that is specific
    to individual text types.

3
Deliverables (1)
  1. Computed-mediated and corpus-driven learning and
    teaching methodology, with a built-in tutorial
    package, relevant to and appropriate for a range
    of applied English language subjects, English
    proficiency subjects, and ESP subjects.
  2. A set of replicable learning and teaching
    activities and materials, aimed at language
    subject areas which would each emphasise
    discipline-specific aspects of English
    phraseology, e.g. pragmatics.
  3. A set of replicable learning and teaching
    activities aimed at ESP, and which can serve as a
    template for other ESP subjects taught by ENGL.

4
Deliverables (2)
  • Design of English Phraseology Software Program
    ConcGram?
  • Online ConcGram? version
  • http//langbank.engl.polyu.edu.hk/RCPCE/
  • ConcGram? was used to search different corpora,
    including RCPCE-Profession-specific corpora Hong
    Kong Financial Services Corpus, Hong Kong
    Engineering Corpus, and Hong Kong Corpus of
    Spoken English in the preparation of learning and
    teaching materials and examples, discussion
    tasks, seminar worksheets, and assignments.

5
Deliverables (3)
  • ConcGram-generated materials, etc. used at BA and
    MA levels
  • ENGL303 Corpus-driven Language Learning
  • ENGL561 Practical Communication Strategies I
  • ENGL560 Analysis of Contemporary English I (50
    lexical studies)
  • ENGL510 Analysis of Contemporary English III
    (discourse and pragmatics)
  • ConcGram? used by PhD students
  • Analysis of hotel website texts
  • Analysis of pragmatic speech acts in a corpus

6
Deliverables (4)
  • Conference papers
  • Greaves, C. and Warren, M. (2007). Uncovering the
    extent of the idiom principle. International
    Conference on Corpus Linguistics. University of
    Birmingham, UK, 27-30 July, 2007.
  • Greaves, C. and Warren, M. (2007). A
    corpus-driven approach to learning and teaching
    the communicative role of discourse intonation.
    Third International Symposium on Teaching English
    at Tertiary Level, Hong Kong, 9-10 June 2007.
  • Knowledge transfer seminars, workshop and
    consultancy
  • ICAC
  • Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union
  • Official Languages Officers
  • Hong Kong Institute of Surveyors, Royal
    Institution of Chartered Surveyors Hong Kong,
    Land Surveying and Geo-informatics Department
  • The Association of Chartered Certified Accounts
  • Hong Kong Federation of Insurance Brokers

7
BA and MA teaching and learning materials, tasks
and assignments
  • Concepts defining phraseology, n-grams and
    skipgrams, concgrams (meaning-shift units,
    collocational frameworks, and organisational
    frameworks), aboutness, aboutgrams, etc.
  • Use of the ConcGram? software program to search
    for and generate phraseological patterns and
    profiles in different corpora, and search results
    used in learning and teaching materials, tasks,
    and assignments

8
Phraseology
  • The phraseological tendency in language, or what
    Sinclair (1987) terms the idiom principle,
    refers to the way words are co-selected by
    speakers and writers.
  • To fully describe the meaning and use of
    language, we need to be able to identify and
    describe the word co-selections which are evident
    in linguistic patterns.

9
n-grams and skipgrams
  • Searches for n-grams (aka clusters or
    bundles) find
  • contiguous words, e.g. a lot of people, but
    not the same
  • pattern in instances such as a lot of
    different people.
  • As a result, instances of word association may be
  • overlooked and those which typically occur in
    non-
  • contiguous sequences (i.e. AB, AB) risk
    going
  • undiscovered.
  • Skipgrams (Wilks, 2005) are non-contiguous word
    co-
  • occurences In other words, they include
    constituency
  • variation (AB, A B) of up to three
    intervening words
  • e.g. a lot of different kinds of people

10
Concgrams
  • a concgram is all of the permutations of
    constituency variation and positional variation
    generated by the association of two or more
    words (Cheng, Greaves and Warren, 2006 414).
  • A concgram includes all instances when one or
    more words are found between the co-occurring
    words (i.e. constituency variation), and if the
    co-occurring words are in different positions
    relative to one another (i.e. positional
    variation).
  • The co-occurring words comprising a particular
    concgram may
  • be the source of a number of configurations.
  • Lists of concgrams are generated fully
    automatically using the program ConcGram? written
    by Chris Greaves.

11
Three types of concgrams
  • meaning-shift units (Sinclair, 2007)
  • collocational frameworks (Renouf and Sinclair,
    1991)
  • organisational frameworks

12
Meaning-shift unit (MSU)
  • An MSU equates to Sinclairs (1996) lexical
    item and is composed of five categories of
    co-selection
  • obligatory invariant core
  • obligatory semantic prosody
  • optional semantic preference
  • optional patterns of collocation, and
  • optional patterns of colligation

13
Illustrating components of an MSU (a two-word
concgram) play/role
  1. Core play, role
  2. Collocation important (23), significant
    (15), major (8), leading/lead (8), central
    (8), key (7), crucial (6), vital (5 )
  3. Colligation modifier, determiner, preposition
  4. Semantic preference business/economic
    activities, organisational/societal relationships
  5. Semantic prosody to participate and/or
    contribute in a weighty/meaningful manner (shown
    in the consistent choice of modifier)

14
Concordance of a two-word concgram (MSU)
expenditure/increase
  • 1 next five years. We also estimate that
    operating expenditure will increase moderately,
    at a rate commensurate
  • 2 in the Consolidated Account for 2008-09.
    Public expenditure as a proportion of GDP will
    increase from 15.9
  • 3 two and a half times the present
    population. The expenditure on the Old Age
    Allowance will increase
  • 4 Since the planning of these projects
    takes time, expenditure on infrastructure is
    unlikely to increase
  • 5 health care system were to remain
    unchanged, expenditure on public health care
    services would increase
  • 6 and social development. We will
    increase expenditure on social services and
    welfare and return part of
  • 7 lead to a decrease in revenue and an
    increase in expenditure in 2008-09. I have also
    earmarked 50 billion to
  • 8 it is expected that the
    increase in overall expenditure on health care
    services will, on average, be two
  • 9 is revenue by 33.5 billion and increase
    operating expenditure by 41.5 billion in
    2008-09. The latter figure
  • 10 measure will increase
    government expenditure on CSSA payments when
    inflation rises. 145
  • 11 be sustainable. If we increase recurrent
    public expenditure or reduce recurrent public
    revenue, we must be
  • 12 Government cannot increase public health
    care expenditure indefinitely, we hope that
    supplementary
  • 13 we will increase the share of public
    health care expenditure to 17 per cent of
    government recurrent

15
Collocational frameworks (1)
  • Collocational frameworks are comprised of
    grammatical
  • words which frame lexical collocates (e.g.
    the President
  • of the United States).
  • Many associated words which recur in a corpus and
    are
  • sometimes listed as individual clusters are
    produced by
  • speakers and writers within a collocational
    framework.
  • Currently, the fundamental role of collocational
  • frameworks is largely ignored by both
    researchers and
  • language teachers in favour of their
    resulting products.

16
Collocational frameworks (2)
  • For example, Carter and McCarthy (2006) list the
  • following 4-word clusters
  • the end of the the side of the
  • the edge of the the middle of
    the
  • the back of the the top of the
  • the bottom of the
  • but they do not describe the 3-word
    collocational
  • framework common to them all the of the.

17
An example of a collocational framework the ...
of
  • a reasonable degree of control over the
    supply of money. We shall return to this method
  • than possibility of movement for the
    number of people you anticipate. When
  • possible consumption, and for many the
    equity of this method of taxation may well be
  • number of applications has kept up, the
    amount of work that we are engaged in has er
  • ampaign. Amongst Labour identifiers, the
    effect of reading a right-wing paper on their
  • cases, one should not underestimate the
    impact of this new illustration of the Court's
  • be over when he broke down badly in the spring
    of 1988. He was promptly retired but
  • indeed form and process figured in the
    titles of a number of books concerned with

18
Organisational frameworks
  • Comprised of conjunctions/connectives and/or
    discourse markers which combine to organise
    part(s) of the discourse.
  • Five of the top ten (next slide) are no surprise
    (or/whether, either/or, and/both, also/but and
    neither/nor). They are known as correlative
    conjunctions.
  • The rest (plus others that do not make it into
    the top ten) are identified by searching for
    concgrams.

19
Top ten 2-word organisational frameworks
  • or/whether
  • either/or
  • because/so
  • and/both
  • also/but
  • actually/what
  • if/then
  • I mean/you know
  • I think/that
  • neither/nor
  • BNC (5 million)

20
Concordances of an organisational framework
because/so
  • assume that it's constant it will be Q over two
    because that takes you half way up so the holding
    cost
  • small pixels the colour doesn't change any but
    because the size is become smaller so the
    resolution
  • didn't get any nasal pharyngeal aspirate anymore
    because the nurses refuse to do it so we in-
    instead we
  • both by nominative and nominative case (.) er
    because this is the accusative (.) so this is
    ruled out
  • appropriate for the items that you're looking at
    because they won't all be the same so we can
    attempt try
  • that question I think it's highly complementary
    because China is such a big country so we'll be
    doing
  • three classroom settings (.) in that paper be-
    because it's it is a group project so I I I'm B
  • also to the department and the university okay
    because like me just a small potato here so I
    cannot
  • ...
  • to Admiralty that often so that's okay with me
    because I don't have to see it that often erm but
    my
  • whenever you can do it so reciprocity isn't rare
    because it's Asian but blue is m- is a more
    western
  • types of situations so we deal with these things
    because there's a very good chance that you'll be
    caught
  • River Delta cities so you're welcome to join us
    because I hope you would find it useful to you in
    terms
  • the tourist group so he goes as fast as he can
    because the dolphins are like chasing the boat
    (.) and

21
Determining aboutness
  • Concgrams are the raw data needed to reveal the
    phraseological profile of a text, or corpus, i.e.
    all of the meaningful associations of words.
  • From the phraseological profile of a text, or
    corpus, it is possible to arrive at its aboutness
    through the identification of aboutgrams.

22
Phraseological profile
  • Concgrams are a useful source of raw data to
    reveal the co-selections made by the speakers and
    writers represented in a text or corpus.
  • They can be used to determine keyness and
    aboutness in the ways that single word
    frequencies are currently used.
  • They are a potential starting point for
    quantifying the extent of phraseology in a corpus
    and hence determining the phraseological profile
    of the language contained within it.

23
An example of a learning and teaching activity
students discuss and compare concgram lists
provided by the teacher
  • Data
  • Engineering text (4,810 words) a research
    article on Seismic Response Reduction of Tall
    Buildings
  • A Hong Kong corpus of Engineering English (1 m
    words)
  • BNC (100 m words)
  • Procedure
  • For each of 1, 2 and 3 above, a list of the ten
    most frequent lexical words, and a list of the
    ten most frequent lexically-rich two word phrases
    are compiled. (following 3 slides)
  • In-class discussion tasks
  • Compare the most frequent lexical words and
    phrases found in the engineering research article
    with those in the Hong Kong Engineering Corpus
    and the BNC.
  • Discuss the findings.

24
Text-specific lexical words most frequent
lexical words in an engineering research article
text
control
building(s)
damper(s)
MR (magnetorheological)
storey
semi-active
logic
system
response(s)
current
25
Text-specific aboutgrams aboutgrams in the
engineering research article
MR damper(s)
building(s)/storey
control/damper(s)
logic control
semi-active/control
control/MR
control algorithm
control/passive
building/response(s)
semi-active logic
26
Engineering-specific aboutgrams
design(s)/structural
structural model(s)
building(s)/design
architectural/model(s)
structural analysis
design/tall
data capture
structural optimisation
analysis/design
form/structural
27
Example of a BA seminar task
  • ENGL303 Corpus-driven Language Learning
    Worksheet 8 Concgrams
  • Learning outcomes
  • To understand the WSConcGram function in
    WordSmith and use it to search for concgrams in
    a corpus, and
  • To analyse the concordance of a concgram, using
    Sinclairs (1996, 2004) model of five categories
    of co-selection the obligatory core word or
    words and semantic prosody, and the optional
    collocation, colligation and semantic preference.
  • ConcGram (Cheng, Greaves and Warren, 2006) is
    acknowledged
  • by Mike Scott.

28
Example of an MA assignment (1)
  • MAEP Lexical Studies
  • ASSIGNMENT TWO Concgramming for lexical items
  • 1. Study the concgram concordance lines below
    (slide 30). Starting with each centred (node)
    word, describe as fully as possible the five
    categories of co-selection that make up a
    lexical item (Sinclair, 2004). (70)
  • Discuss the claim that an understanding of
    phraseology is the key to understanding lexical
    items as units of meaning. Use your analysis of
    one of the following sets of concgram concordance
    lines in your discussion. (30)
  • Suggested length 1,200 words

29
Example of an MA assignment (2)
  • play/role
  • 1 The advisers Professional
    advisers play an essential role in the management
    buy-out
  • 2 1. What is market research, and why
    does it play an important role in the marketing
    function?
  • 3 last-mentioned - marketing research
    agencies - play a significant role in the whole
    area of
  • 4 M Ps can help in coordinating this. They
    could play an outstanding role in, in giving the
    information
  • 5 who will discuss how the private
    sector can play a more prominent role in local
    and urban
  • 6 person in his organization has a major
    role to play in pleasing the customer and they
    know it, and
  • 7 The financial controller has a key
    role to play in facilitating this learning
    process by
  • 8 Select Committees will have an important
    role to play in further developing the
    presentation of these
  • 9 sections like the British, have a vital
    role to play. The annual budget for 1990 was
    GBP11 million,
  • 10 resource does have a significant
    role to play in helping corporations to achieve
    viable
  • provide/service
  • 1 the civil servant takes pride in the
    quality of service provided. Similarly, if the
    official is expected
  • 2 I believe in particular, the best
    possible service we can provide. ltu whoPS1UVgt
    We're going down
  • 3 have absolutely no affect on the quality
    of the service that we provide to our client, but
    they form
  • 4 f efficiency and quality, in fact we
    provide a service that's second to none. We
    shouldn't have to
  • 5 weak and can only gain strength by
    providing a service superior to that of his
    competitors.

30
References
  • Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (2006). Cambridge
    Grammar of English. Cambridge Cambridge
    University Press.
  • Cheng, W., Greaves, C. and Warren, M. (2006).
    From n-gram to skipgram to concgram.
    International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
    11(4) 411-433.
  • Renouf, A.J. and Sinclair, J.McH. (1991)
    Collocational Frameworks in English, in Ajimer
    and Altenberg (eds) English Corpus Linguistics,
    pp 128-43.
  • Sinclair, J. McH. (1987). Collocation A Progress
    Report, in R. Steele and T. Threadgold (eds)
    Language Topics Essays in Honour of Michael
    Halliday, pp. 319-331. Amsterdam John Benjamins.
  • Sinclair, J. McH. (1996). The search for units of
    meaning. Textus 9/1 75-106.
  • Sinclair, J. McH. (2007). Collocation Reviewed.
    (manuscript), Tuscan Word Centre, Italy.
  • Wilks, Y. (2005). REVEAL the notion of anomalous
    texts in a very large corpus. Tuscan Word Centre
    International Workshop. Certosa di Pontignano,
    Tuscany, Italy, 30 June 3 July 2005.
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