How to improve students' writing performance with the corpora? (2)

 Hello, everyone! Your lovely BP is back! 👻👻

Last week, I displayed how to utilize the corpora to improve students' writing with Sketch Engine (i.e. Word Sketch and Concordance module). This week, as promised, I am gonna introduce another two modules on the dashboard (i.e. Word Sketch Difference and Thesaurus). 

Here is the link to Sketch Engine: 
https://app.sketchengine.eu/#dashboardcorpname=preloaded%2Fbnc2_tt21

Now let's begin! ✌✌

Step 1 Open the Sketch Engine

Step 2 Intro to Word Sketch Difference

The Word Sketch Difference serves for comparison consultation by contrasting collocations.

Let's take "deeply" and "closely" as examples. Students often mix the two words in their writings such as "deeply related to", the more natural expression of which, however, is "closely related to". Then how can we check which collocation is more suitable? That is how this module plays a role.

Following are the analysis results. The green area displays the collocations of "deeply+n." (e.g. deeply breathe, deeply embed), and read of "closely+n." (e.g. closely link, closely relate). The second column shows the frequency of "deeply+n.", and the third "closely+n.".

So we can see native speakers do not use the collocation of "deeply relate". 

Sketch Engine also provides a visualization map of the differences as follows. This will make your presentation more attractive! 😜 So next time try to include that in your slides. 

Also, do not forget our old friend "Concordance". If we search for "deeply related to" in the concordance module, nothing will be found, indicating that this can be unnatural and should not appear in formal compositions.

Step 3 Intro to Thesaurus

Sketch Engine describes the thesaurus as an automatically generated list of synonyms or words based on the context in which the words appear in the selected corpus. Put simply, it is a module for synonym searching. 

For example, if we want to search for some words to replace "ensure". Click on "Go", and then we get it (e.g. "secure", "guarantee", and "maintain".

Notice that the synonyms listed can not necessarily be used in the totally same context as they are just similar in meanings.

This function is quite useful to enrich the vocabulary in our compositions. If you still remember what we have learned in 'Vocabprofiler", you must have guessed what I will say.

That's all for today's blog and that's all for my general introduction to the corpus and Sketch Engine. The functions I posted here are very basic but never underestimate their power as they will largely promote L2 writing with full utilization.

For more information on how can we use the corpus for ELT, the following books are recommended.

Granger, S., Gilquin, G., & Meunier, F. (Eds.). (2015). The Cambridge handbook of learner corpus research. Cambridge University Press.

O'Keeffe, A., & McCarthy, M. (Eds.). (2010). The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics (Vol. 23). London: Routledge.

Timmis, I. (2015). Corpus linguistics for ELT: Research and practice. Routledge.

Viana, V. (Ed.). (2022). Teaching English with Corpora: A Resource Book. Taylor & Francis.

Again, any of your comment is welcome!👂👂