Graeme Kennedy

How Useful Is Eap Vocabulary for Esp? a Corpus Based Case Study

This study compares the vocabulary of a single Economics text of almost 300,000 running words with the vocabulary of a corpus of similar length made up of a variety of academic texts. It was found that the general academic corpus used a very much larger vocabulary than the more focused Economics text. A small number of words that were closely related to the topic of the text occurred with very high frequency in the Economics text. The general academic corpus had a very large number of low frequency words. Beyond the words in Wests General Service List and the University Word List, there was little overlap between the vocabulary of the two corpora. This indicates that as far as vocabulary is concerned, EAP courses that go beyond the high frequency academic vocabulary are of little value for learners with specific purposes.

Amplifier Collocations in the British National Corpus: Implications for English Language Teaching

considers some possible implications for English language teaching. The mutual information measure is used to show the strength of the bond between 24 selected amplifiers such as extremely or greatly and other words (typically adjectives or participles such as rare or appreciated, which result in collocations such as extremely rare or greatly appreciated). Each amplifier is shown to collocate most strongly with particular words having particular grammatical and semantic characteristics. Research in cognitive science has shown the extent to which words and collocations become established as units of learning depending on the frequency with which they are experienced. In the light of the corpus-based evidence on the nature of collocations presented in this study, the teaching of collocations might be expected to have a more explicit and prominent place in the language teaching curriculum. In class, teachers can draw attention to collocations not only through direct teaching but also by maximizing opportunities to acquire them through an emphasis on autonomous implicit learning activities such as reading.

Expressing Temporal Frequency in Academic English.

Recent studies have shown the need for more attention to be paid to English as form and not only as communication. This article describes a methodology for discovering how the communicative notion of temporal frequency is expressed in academic English. Almost 300 different linguistic devices are identified and described, along with the number of times they each occur in two large corpora of written academic English which can be used for computer analysis. The article also highlights the potential of computer-assisted analysis of authentic texts to help improve the basis for the development of language teaching materials.

Expressing Causation in Written English

This article reports a study of the ways in which the notion of causation is expressed in written British English. The focus of the study was on how causation is marked or expressed explicitly in the computerised one million word LOB corpus. A total of 130 different devices for expressing causation was collected from a number of sources, and the frequency of these devices in the LOB corpus was established. The use of causative conjunctions was found to be the most frequent of eight major ways of marking causation, closely followed by causative adverbs. There was a tendency for language in use to focus on the cause or reason rather than effect in a causal rela tionship. Causation is also sometimes implied rather than marked explicitly in texts. Because implicit causation is much more difficult to identify, it is suggested that more attention needs to be paid to im plied causation in English language teaching. Comprehension of cau sation is important in language use, affecting both the analysis of in formation in texts and skills such as notetaking involving accurate in formation transfer. The findings of the study provide an empirical basis for the development of course design and teaching materials, especially for courses in English for academic purposes.

Semantic Priorities in English Language Teaching

learners how to use a second or foreign language appropriately in relation to the world and other people has almost always been at the forefront of their work. While older methods of teaching have sometimes been classed as inadequate, study of past language teaching practices shows that although emphases have changed, language as communication has rarely been neglected to the extent that is sometimes suggested.

Interlanguage: A Review and A Preview

The new impetus to research on second language learning has come mainly from developments in the field of developmental psycholinguistics, itself a reflection of changing views of language associated especially with the development of transformational generative theory. The writings of Brown, Ervin-Tripp, Clark, Slobin, and others in the field of first language acquisition have stimulated researchers to look at second language data in a similar way.

An under-exploited resource: using the BNC for exploring the nature of language learning

At a time when the use of the world wide web as a source of data for linguistic description is beginning to be explored by corpus linguists, this paper considers insights which can be gained from an existing structured corpus, and possible implications for our understanding of the nature of language learning. The British National Corpus (BNC) is used as a source of data to explore semantic relations which may underlie certain multi-word sequences identified in the corpus. The analysis focuses on collocations containing verbs or amplifiers. It is suggested that the richness of the data in the BNC is still somewhat under-exploited for the description of English, and for exploring the nature of language learning and teaching.

Reviews : An Empirical Grammar of the English Verb: Modal Verbs. By Dieter Mindt. Berlin: Cornelsen Verlag, 1995. 192

The extent to which the corpus revolution has taken hold can be appreciated when innovative, high-quality, corpus-based grammars which complement the notable achievements in corpus-based lexicography of the last decade begin to appear. Dieter Mindt’s new work An Empirical Grammar of the English Verb: Modal Verbs (EGEVMV) is the first part of a pedagogically oriented description of the English verb system based on access to over 80 million words of textual material. It is claimed that &dquo;there has been no borrowing from previous grammars,&dquo; and it is certainly true that the more than 150 pages of description of the morphology, syntax, and, in particular, the functions of modal verbs presented in the book break new ground. In a number of ways, EGEVMV is a valuable work which goes beyond the pioneering corpus-based description of English modals undertaken by Coates (1983). The new work has two main parts. First, there is a systematic description of the forms and meanings of each of the modal verbs and the grammatical contexts in which each occurs. In addition to nine &dquo;central modals&dquo; (will, would, can, could, shall, should, may, might, must), the description covers used to, ought to, be to, have got to, need, dare. Of these, used to and dare fit a little uncomfortably within the functional framework of the other modals.