Presentation/workshop at the ETJ Expo in Tokyo, Japan; October 30, 2016. For more information visit: http://wp.me/p7hwDK-gT

1. Not Just For Reference
Dictionaries and corpora as language
acquisition tools

2. Some recent errors in my students’ work
• “… in the stove.”
• “… swore revenge to …”
• “I’ll introduce about …”
• “Almost people like …”
• “… sum dishes.”

3. Everyone knows how to use a dictionary, right?
• Monolingual dictionary: Look up meanings
• Bilingual dictionary: Look up translations
• Would a dictionary help with correcting this sentence?
• Put the pot in the stove.
• Would a grammar book help? Grammar books usually have
sections for prepositions of place or time which treat
prepositions in general, abstract terms.

4. Specialist Learner Dictionaries
• Monolingual dictionary entry for "stove"
• Bilingual dictionary entry for "stove"
• Learner's dictionary entry for "stove"
• Learner dictionaries contain information language learners
need that is often missing or hard to find in other kinds of
dictionaries and grammars.

5. Non-time and Non-place Prepositions
• “Then he swore revenge to his enemy.”
• Standard dictionaries and grammar books are not very helpful
for finding out what preposition will collocate with revenge in
the sentence above.
• Learner's dictionary entry

6. Expert Dictionary Users
• Students can be shown how different kinds of dictionaries
have different kinds of information.
• Students can be taught how to effectively use learner
dictionaries by completing tasks that require them to find the
kinds of linguistic information provided in learner
dictionaries.
• Expose them to problems or usage that they would not
notice on their own.

7. Dictionaries and Language Acquisition
• Effective use of dictionaries takes learner’s beyond using
them only to look up meanings or L1:L2 equivalents.
• It engages them in higher-order thinking.
• They develop noticing and inferencing skills, see examples of
authentic use, and discover common patterns and forms.
• The kinds of information that learner dictionaries provide is
essential for students to develop fluency.

8. Corpus (plural: corpora)
• A corpus is a collection of language-in-use that is
representative of a language variety, dialect, style, genre, etc.
• Corpora do not directly describe anything about the
language. Rather, they can be searched, sorted, and analyzed
to reveal things about language that are otherwise difficult to
know or understand.

9. Bilingual Corpora
• A bilingual corpus or, more accurately, a parallel corpus is a
collection of L1 texts and their translations into an L2.
• There is some evidence that parallel corpora are better suited for
language learners than monolingual corpora.
• For example, if the focus of study is a particular grammar pattern,
parallel corpora allow students to quickly get the gist of a
concordance line (they don’t need to know every word in the
target language lines) and focus on the pattern in question.

10. Corpus Example
• “Next, I will introduce about their traditional cuisine.”
• Instead of telling students that “about” is an error in this sentence,
let them see and make their own conclusions.
• Online parallel newspaper corpus (English and Japanese)
• Use guiding questions to help students make sense of the data. For
example: “There is an error in the phrase will introduce about.
Look at these lines from newspapers. Can you figure out what the
error is?”
• This is more likely to result in deeper learning and retention.

11. Similar (Hybrid?) Tools
• “The menu features sum dishes.”
• The student was thinking of how to express 和 in English.
• Bilingual dictionary entry
• Linguee entry
• Exposure to different possible translations.
• Exposure to real-world uses of the search term(s).
• Exposure to grammatical context.

12. Pedagogic Parallel Corpus
• “Almost people like ice cream.”
• A pedagogic parallel corpus is a parallel corpus that has been
designed for educational use, not research purposes.
• English and Japanese pedagogic parallel corpus
• Students can use a pedagogic parallel corpus and guided questions
to determine what the error is and how to remedy it. They can also
be exposed to several other ways in which “almost” is used,
deepening their knowledge of the word and its grammar.

13. Anticipating Needs
• Is the explanation of the
grammar point unclear or
complicated?
• Does it use a lot of
metalanguage?
• Are there enough examples?
• Is it contextualized?

14. Data-Driven Learning (DDL)
• DDL is a method where students analyze language and form their own
conclusions about rules and patterns. For the grammar point on the
previous slide, I had my students use the SCoRE corpus and I prepared
guiding questions to help them analyze the data.
• Step 1: They opened SCoRE’s Pattern Browser tool and selected the ‘if +
past tense’ pattern at the intermediate level.
• Step 2: They read several example sentences (with Japanese translations).
• Step 3: They answered guided questions.
• Step 4: They determined the rules, and I confirmed them.

15. A Little More Detail
• The guided questions (and tasks) were things like: “What kind of
verb comes after ‘would’ in these sentences?”, “List 5 verbs that
come after ‘would’”, and “Are these sentences describing real or
imagined situations?”
• The conclusions also may be guided: “This grammar pattern is for
talking about ------- situations”, “If the clause uses ‘if’, then the
following verb should be in the ------- form”, etc. Or they can be left
open-ended for the students to describe how they understand the
grammar pattern.
• Please see the handout for more details about this activity.

16. Some Other Features and ‘Can-Do’ Aspects
• User-friendliness
• Frequency information
• Collocations
• Encounter words in a variety of contexts
• Compare multiple senses of a single word
• Pre-teaching vocabulary or structures
• Explore cognates, loanwords, and false friends
• Explore connotation and semantic prosody
• Error correction
• Supplement activities with concentrated doses of
vocabulary/grammar study
• Use these tools for the questions students care about

17. Resources
English-English Online Learner Dictionaries
• Cambridge Learner's Dictionary
• Oxford Learner's Dictionaries
• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English
• Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary
Parallel Corpora (English and Japanese)
• WebParaNews (News Corpus)
• Sentence Corpus of Remedial English
(Pedagogic Corpus)
Bilingual Dictionary with Bilingual
Translation ‘Corpus’
• Linguee

18. Sources
1. Chujo, K., Kobayashi, Y., Mizumoto, A., & Oghigian, K. (2016). ‘Exploring the Effectiveness of Combined Web-based
Corpus Tools for Beginner EFL DDL’, Linguistics and Literature Studies, 4(4): 262-274.
2. Chujo, K., Oghigian, K., & Nishigaki, C. (2012). ‘Beginner level EFL DDL using a parallel web-based concordancer’, In Pan-
Asian Conference on Language Teaching and Learning (PAC) 2012 and 9th FEELTA International Conference, Far
Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia.
3. Frankenberg-Garcia, A. (2012). ‘Integrating corpora with everyday language teaching’, Input, Process, and Product:
Development in Teaching and Language Corpora, Brno: Masryk University Press, 36-53.
4. Frankenberg-Garcia, A. (2011). ‘Beyond L1-L2 Equivalents: Where Do Users of English as a Foreign Language Turn for
Help?’, International Journal of Lexicography, 24(1): 97-123.
5. Minematsu, K. (2014). ‘Using a Corpus in an EFL Classroom to Develop Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge’, The Tsuru
University Review, 79: 143-136.
6. Nurmukhamedov, U. (2012). ‘Online English-English Learner Dictionaries Boost Word Learning’, English Teaching
Forum, 50(4): 10-15.
7. Quinn, C. (2015). ‘Training L2 writers to reference corpora as a self-correction tool’, ELT Journal, 69(2): 165-177.