Taxonomy of VLS by Schmitt (1997)

1. Taxonomy of VLS by Schmitt (1997) • Taxonomy of Language Learning Strategies (LLS) by O’Malley & Chamot, 1990: cognitive, metacognitive, socio-affective • Oxford’s (1990) LLS taxonomy – direct strategies: involving the target language directly and require mental processing of the language (memory, cognitive, compensation) and indirect strategies: (metacognitive, affective, social) • Nation (1990) – discovery vs consolidation strategies • Schmitt’s (1997) VLS taxonomy: (1) Discovery:discovering the meaning of unknown words • Determination strategies (finding meaning without recourse to others) • Social strategies (consulting or working with others to discover meaning) (2) Consolidation:remembering words once their meaning has been discovered • Social strategies • Memory strategies (mnemonics) • Cognitive strategies (similar to memory, but without the use of mnemonics) • Metacognitive strategies (planning, monitoring, evaluation of learning)

2. The positive effect of VLS training:Strategies can be taught and acquired Strategies that were reported to be used significantly more frequently at the end of the course than at the beginning of the course: • *Strategies introduced in the English (EAP) course for Dentistry students • Source: Loong Y & Chan S W L, A Study of Vocabulary Learning Strategies Adopted by Dentistry Students in Hong Kong In Learning Specialized Dental Vocabulary, September 2012, Asian ESP Journal

3. Schmitt (1997) 600 Japanese EFL college learners (junior high school / high school / university / adult ss) preferred using the bilingual dictionary to discover meaning of words Preferred verbal and written repetition (mechanical rehearsals) to remember the meanings As the Japanese learners matured, they tended to move away from shallow, mechanical repetition such as word lists and flash cards to deeper mental processing such as word association strategies

4. Nation’s (2001) Taxonomy

5. Memory Strategy – Using Mental Images (Adapted from forthcoming “Loong Y & Chan S W L, A Study of Vocabulary Learning Strategies Adopted by Dentistry Students in Hong Kong In Learning Specialized Dental Vocabulary, September 2012, Asian ESP Journal”)

6. Memory Strategy – The Keyword Technique Step One: Think of a word that you know that has a similar sound (audionym “Keyword” ) Step Two: Create a mental image to link up the Keyword with the target word (Adapted from Brahler, C. J. & Walker, D. (2008). Learning scientific and medical terminology with a mnemonic strategy using an illogical association technique. Advances in Physiology Education, 32, 219-224.)

7. The “keyword” technique

8. The “keyword” technique

9. Kurai - Cry • Imagine the visual of a baby crying when it’s dark

10. Karada - colored • a colored body

11. How easy is it to guess the meaning of the underlined words? The Nanu region is famous for its wonderful scenery, ancient temples and, above all, the indigenous people of Sofa. In their remote village, reached after an arduous and dusty drive, live the Sofans, with their welcoming smiles and warm affability. Few visitors, however, make this trip as it is not on the normal itinerary of most tour groups. As I sauntered through the village, I stopped for a few moments on a bridge to watch the boisterous children splashing each other with water. School hours are short here and many of the teenagers seem to squander their daylight hours riding around the square on noisy old motorcycles. Groups of local women spend their days weaving coloured silk into stunning fabrics. Their remuneration is only a few dollars although they may have worked for several days to create each one. As dusk approaches, the men return from the fields where they have been toiling all day, hungry and ready for a quiet evening with their families.

12. Guessing strategies • Study the word itself (what pos? any word parts?) • Examine immediate context • Examine wider context • Make a guess • Verify your guess by using a dictionary

13. Strategies for guessing word meaning from context (Nation, 1990) Step 1: What part of speech is it? Is it a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb? Step 2: Does it contain any familiar parts? (e.g. in-digest-ible) Does it look similar to another word you already know? Step 3: Examine the immediate context. If the unknown word is a Noun What adjectives describe it? What verb does it go with? What does it do and what is done to it? Verb What nouns go with it? Does an adverb tell you more about it? Adjective What noun does it go with? Adverb Which verb does it go with?

14. Step 4: • Examine the wider context. Look at the relationship between the clause or sentence containing the unknown word and other sentences or paragraphs. • Sometimes this relationship is signalled by a linking word, e.g. but, because, if, when, however, as a result. • Word like this, that and such as provide useful information. • Look for a definition or synonym in the wider context. • Make use of that / which clauses that give further information. • Look at punctuation for clues. • dashes - • brackets ( ) • colons : • semi colons ; • Step 5: • Guess the meaning. • Step 6: • Substitute your guess. Does the sentence make sense? If you’re still unsure, look it up in a dictionary.

15. Answers • Arduous – difficult / tiring • Affability – friendliness • Saunter – walk slowly • Boisterous – noisy / energetic • Squander – spend in a wasteful way • Weave – make cloth • Remuneration – payment • Dusk – early evening • Toil – work very hard

16. Selection Strategies:Which words should you skip learning? (Nation, 1990)

17. Recording vocabulary • Relate new words with old words (e.g. words that look / sound similar, synonyms, antonyms • collocations • Grammatical behavior (e.g. prepositions, pos, c/unc, regular/irregular verb) • use a drawing • Word cards? Portable devices?

18. Revising vocabulary Plan for “spaced repetition” Use quizzes to test yourself regularly Follow a particular topic reported in the media over a few days, e.g. reading about the development of an issue on the Internet or in newspapers over a few days so that you keep meeting the same words or synonyms of these words Try to use the words you learnt before, e.g. by writing sentences or paragraphs using these words Revise the words recorded in your vocabulary notebook or cards regularly (e.g. cover up the word or definition and test yourself) Ask a friend to test you / practice using words you learnt before with a friend

19. Importance of Revision

20. Spaced / Distributed Repetition

21. VLS research on Chinese learners

22. VLS research on Chinese learners • Gu and Johnson (1996) -- China • VLS and learning outcomes (vocab size and lg prof) • Gu (2002) -- China • VLS and vocab size, lg prof, gender, academic major • Gu (2003) -- China • VLS of two successful EFL learners (selected from 11 learners who carried out “think-aloud” during a reading task, and were interviewed afterwards; the notes they took during the reading task were studied) • Wei (2007) -- China • VLS and gender, major, lg prof (self-reported), problems in vocab learning • Liao (2004) -- Taiwan • VLS and major • Fan (2003) -- HK • Use of VLS (questionnaire – frequency of use & perceived usefulness)

23. Some conclusions based on these studies Positive correlation between strategy use and language proficiency / learning outcomes Successful learners use a wider range of strategies, use deeper processing strategies, and use strategies more skillfully / flexibly Importance of self-initiation, selective attention, guessing word meaning, activation of newly learned words Management, activation of newly learnt /known words, association, and social strategiesseem under-used by Asian learners

24. Use of Concordancers A corpus – a large collection of texts, written or spoken, stored on a computer. A concordancer – a computer programme used to search this database

25. Considerations • General English / Academic English / Specialised English (e.g. medical and law corpora on Compleat Lexical Tutor)? • Written / Spoken? • Size? • Currency? • Free of charge?

26. Corpus Size • “I don’t think there can be any corpora, however large, that contain information about all of the areas of English….that I want to explore [but] every corpus that I’ve had a chance to examine, however small, has taught me facts that I couldn’t imagine finding out about in any other way.” (Fillmore, 1992, p. 35)

27. Use of Corpora • Word lists and dictionary entries (different senses of a word / typical examples of usage / frequency information) are compiled by computational linguists using a corpus of the language. • E.g. In the 1980s, Collins started to use a computerised corpus (then called the COBUILD corpus) with John Sinclair of University of Birmingham; now the Collins Cobuild Corpus has 2.5 billion words (part of which is the Bank of English Corpus (http://www.collinslanguage.com/collins-elt-learners-of-english/cobuild & http://www.mycobuild.com/about-collins-corpus.aspx) • E.g. Macmillan Dictionary: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/corpus.html

28. Major corpus: BNC • 100 million words • Written (90%) and spoken (10%) samples • British English from the 1980’s to 1993 • General English • http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

29. Major corpus: Bank of English • 450 million words by 2005 • 75% written and 25% spoken • 70% British, 20% American and 10% others • Contemporary English • http://www.titania.bham.ac.uk/docs/svenguide.html

30. Major corpus: Brown corpus • 1 million words • American English • One of the earliest corpora / compiled in 1960s • 500 text samples from 15 text categories • Searchable through Compleat Lexical Tutor at http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html

31. Major Corpus: The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) Contemporary American English containing about 450 million words from 1990 to present http://www.americancorpus.org/

32. Major corpus: MICASE • Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English • started in 1997 • contains transcripts and audio files of academic speech • http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/

33. Some user-friendly concordancers Word Neighbors (developed by University of Science and Technology) www.just-the-word.com COCA (needs registration)

34. Tasks - answers • The public have expressed concern about … / … are of great concern to the public • Sufficient / clear / strong evidence • Improve / increase / promote efficency • Substitute for • Sheer ( volume / numbers / rates / amount / number )

35. How can corpora be used in the classroom? • Among these suggestions by Nicholas Medley, which ones are applicable in your classroom?

36. How can corpora data be used to facilitate vocabulary learning/teaching? • Study words in contextand increase depth of processing • Check grammatical behaviour of words e.g. what prepositions to use after a verb • Check collocations and lexical patterns • Find out about the frequencies of words / word combinations • Find out about usage of a word in different text types (e.g. fiction vs academic / spoken vs written)

37. Submission of Assignment Deadline: October 28 Hard copy to Cecilia Soft copy via www.turnitin.com

38. Preparation for next class • Give an oral outline of your assignment • Can consider: • Conference abstracts of JALT Vocabulary Symposium (2012) (post-session 4 reading)