Web Concordancing and Vocabulary Acquisition

Objectives

Learners need to encounter a vocabulary item in multiple contexts (including its various meanings, grammar patterns, collocations, etc.) to encourage acquisition for productive use.  Consulting a dictionary may help learners understand a vocabulary item better when it is encountered in a single context, but this will not necessarily lead to acquisition and/or productive use. In order to facilitate this acquisition, students will learn about the advantages of using a concordancer (software for searching a corpus) and concordancing (entering a word and searching for text that illustrates it in the corpus). Students have the added benefit of seeing the word used in authentic contexts.

Prerequisites/Previously Learned Features

Students have already learned about using context clues to help them guess the meaning of unknown words in a text. Knowledge of these techniques will aid students in understanding the different meanings and functions a word can have when found in different contexts.

Materials

1.                  Printed copies of the following Newsweek article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4988490/site/newsweek/

2.                  Computers with access to the Internet

3.                  OHP connected to a computer to demonstrate the concordancing procedure to students

4.                  Hypertext version of a Newsweek article at the following URL:

http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/cgi-bin/teach/users/Newsweek%20Article-master.htm

Procedure

1.                  Preview/Warm-up

a.                  Students will be discussing and writing about the presidential election throughout the term. Start the lesson with a general discussion on the election. What do the students know about the election and the candidates? What do they know about the American political system in general?

2.            Lesson Core

a.         Tell the students that they will now read the Newsweek article (printed copy) silently. They will read the first time for global meaning, and they shouldn’t use a dictionary at this point. Be sure to give students a time limit so they don’t get too bogged down with individual words. 

b.                 Discuss the main ideas of the article. What are the author’s main points? Ask some leading questions to stimulate the discussion and facilitate students’ global understanding of the article.

c.                  Explain what a concordancer is and how it can help them learn about a word in different contexts. Explain how they can use The Compleat Lexical Tutor to search simultaneously for concordances and dictionary definitions, and what they can learn from the results.

d.                 Go over an example using an OHP so students can see how to conduct a search, what kind of results they can expect, how to use the WordNet search feature, etc. Then, give them a sample word to search on their own. Discuss the results they get.

c.                  Now, direct the students to the following URL:

http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/cgi-bin/teach/users/Newsweek%20Article-master.htm

For the purposes of this lesson, give students a list of difficult words from the article that they should search for. Try to limit the number of words since they are still getting used to the procedure (maybe only one per paragraph at this point). They can do the search in pairs so they can help each other with the procedure and the meanings of the search words in different contexts.

d.         Answer the following questions about each of the search words: 1. What grammatical functions does the word have in the examples you found? 2. How many different meanings did you encounter? 3. How frequent is the word in the corpus? 4. What did you learn in general and how valuable is it for you to learn this word?  

e.                  Ask the students to read the article once again and decide if this process has aided their comprehension in any way.

3.            Closure

a.                  Allow time for questions at the end. Make sure students understand the process and give some extra help for those who may not.

b.                 Homework: Students will read another Newsweek article at home. This time, they will choose the words they find difficult and carry out a concordancing search using The Compleat Lexical Tutor. In the next class, each student will give an example of a word he/she searched for, and we’ll discuss the results as a class.

Present Perfect & Simple Past – “Electronic Postcards”

Objectives

Students will learn about the differences in meaning and use between the simple past and present perfect tenses. They will learn about these differences in an authentic way by receiving and writing their own “electronic postcards.”  

Prerequisites/Previously Learned Features

Students have already learned how to form the simple and present perfect tenses in previous lessons.  This lesson will focus on the meanings conveyed by both tenses and their uses in written and spoken English. 

Materials

1.                  Computers with access to the Internet

2.                  Website for composing “electronic postcards” at The Electronic Postcard Rack  - http://postcard.dntis.ro/

3.                  E-mail accounts for all students in the class

4.                  OHP attached to a computer to go over the contents of the “electronic postcard” as a class

Procedure

1.                  Preview/Warm-up

Introduce the lesson by talking briefly about taking trips and keeping in touch with people back home. How do most people keep in touch? E-mail? Letters? Postcards? How do they feel when they receive a postcard or an e-mail message from a friend or family member who is far away?

2.            Lesson Core

a.      Just before class, send an “electronic postcard” to all the students in the class. This postcard will contain a brief message with examples of the present perfect and simple past tenses with errors in verb tense usage.

b.      Ask the students to log into their e-mail accounts and retrieve the “special message” they have received. Assist any students who have trouble accessing their postcards. Ask them to read the message silently.    

c.       Now, have the students print their postcards. Remind the students that we have already talked about the formation of the simple past and present perfect tenses in English. With a partner, the students should look for and circle all examples of these two tenses in the message.  Then, the pairs should decide together which examples are correct and which are incorrect. They should give reasons to support their decisions.

d.     Once they have finished, direct students’ attention to the postcard message on the OHP. Go through the verbs tenses they have circled, calling on different pairs of students to comment on each. They should give reasons to support their comments.  

3.            Closure

a.                  Ask students if they have any questions about the material presented in class today.

b.                 Homework: Ask students to create their own “electronic postcards” with examples of the present perfect and simple past tenses. Direct students to The Electronic Postcard Rack website:

http://postcard.dntis.ro

Go through the procedure for creating postcards. They can e-mail their postcards to other students in the class, but they must e-mail a copy to the instructor too.