MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING BARIA VUNGTAU UNIVERSITY -------------- BUILDING ECOTOURISM CORPUS AND APPLICATION OF CORPUS-BASED MATERIALS IN VOCABULARY TEACHING --------------------------- Student’s name: Đào Đức Tâm Student’s code: 18114181 Class: MTESOL18K4 Instructor’s name: Assoc. Phạm Vũ Phi Hổ, PhD. Ba Ria-Vung Tau, April 2022 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Throughout the writing of this dissertation I have received a great deal of support and assistance. I would first like to thank my supervisor, Assoc.
Pham Vu Phi Ho, Ph., whose expertise was invaluable in formulating the research questions and methodology. Your insightful feedback pushed me to sharpen my thinking and brought my work to a higher level. I would like to acknowledge my colleagues from my internship at Bidoup Nui Ba National Park for their wonderful collaboration. I would particularly like to single out my supervisor at Bidoup Nui Ba National Park, Mr.
Le Van Huong, I want to thank you for your patient support and for all of the opportunities I was given to further my research. I would also like to thank my tutors, Mr. Tran Xuan Dung, for their valuable guidance throughout my studies. You provided me with the tools that I needed to choose the right direction and successfully complete my dissertation.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their wise counsel and sympathetic ear. You are always there for me, for always supporting and encouraging me in my good and bad times. ABSTRACT BUILDING ECOTOURISM CORPUS AND APPLICATION OF CORPUS-BASED MATERIALS IN VOCABULARY TEACHING DAO, Duc Tam M. Thesis in TESOL Supervisor: Assoc.
PHAM Vu Phi Ho April 2022, 91 Pages This study explored the efficiency of using corpus-based activities in English vocabulary teaching and learning. The study aims to, first research the efficiency of corpus-based activities in vocabulary teaching rather than traditional methods such as textbook activities and dictionaries in vocabulary session, secondly to research students' attitudes towards corpus- based vocabulary activities. Thirty-four secondary students at a Hermann Gmeiner school participated in the study. There were two separate groups; the experimental group worked on concordance-based materials, while the control group leant with textbook and dictionary as tradition.
The study was quasi-experimental research and included both quantitative and qualitative research instruments. As quantitative instruments, a qualification examination, pre- and post tests and a questionnaire based on a 5-point Likert scale were utilized. Interviews and learner diaries were used as qualitative instruments. The test results were statistically analyzed revealing that using corpus-based vocabulary activities were more effective than the traditional way that the students use the textbook and dictionary for vocabulary learning.
Moreover, the findings showed that the students' attitudes were positive towards using corpus-based vocabulary activities. Key words: Corpus-based activities, concordance lines, corpora, vocabulary learning, student attitudes. Background of the study. Statement of the problem.
The aim and scope of the study. Assumptions and limitations of the study. Terms and concepts. History of corpus.
Types of corpora. Corpora in language teaching. The corpus approach (data-driven learning approach). Corpus-based vocabulary research in the world.
Corpus-based vocabulary research in Vietnam. Data and corpus building. Data choosing and corpora edifice. Line of corpora deconstruction.
Acting at the commonness expression list. Acting at collocates. The aim of the reverie and examination interrogatives. Instruments and materials.
Pre and Post Tests. Data collection procedure. Proficiency test results. Data analysis procedure.
Findings And Discussion. Pre-test Results. Summary of the study. Pedagogical implications of the study.
Implications of the study for language teachers. Implications of the study for material designers. Implications of the study for students. Implications of the study for testing units.
Suggestions for further research .67 PRE-TEST & POST TEST .70 CORPUS-BASED VOCABULARY ACTIVITIES .70 APPENDIX 5 - SAMPLE VOCABULARY ACTIVITIES FROM THE TEXTBOOK .80 6 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This thesis aims to develop from my interest in considering the corpus approach that can be applied to evaluate the use of corpus-based lexical activities in the Vietnamese context. The first part of the introductory chapter provides some information about the background of the study and the need to do it. The second section provides information on the purpose and importance of the study. It continues with assumptions and limitations, and finally, terms and concepts.
Background of the study Corpora has been recognized as a valuable resource in language teaching in the description of authentic and authentic texts for language learners (Hunston, 2002). Application of electronic corpus in teaching and learning foreign languages has been paid much attention in recent years. As Hanks (2008, quoted in Boulton, 2010: 2) states, “they are now most common in the construction of references, especially dictionaries, but also language books. Thanks to the availability of different types of corpus, we now have access to a multitude of authentic examples to which we wish to turn.
Armed with these kinds of resources, we can more easily guide our students in learning pragmatic and sociolinguistically appropriate uses of language (Simpson Vlach & Leicher, 2006). Corporations are useful for language teachers because they increase the significant contribution provided to students (Biber and Reppen, 2002). The word corpus (corpora in the plural) designates "a set of texts considered representative of a given language, or of another subset of a language, to be used for linguistic analysis" (Francis, 1964: 109). "The concordance program is a program which builds the frequency of use of a certain set of words in the corpus" Concordance lines are examples of words or sentences presented in the center of the page with their contexts and they are retrieved from corpora (Sripicharn, 2002).
7 Many teachers stay away from technology and may have the misconception that concordance is an expensive luxury (Woolard, 2000). However, there are freely available concordances. Some available online corpora include the British National Corpus (BNC, http://www.uk), the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE, http://micase.info), and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, http://www. These corpora are easy to access and rich; COCA, for instance, includes 450 million words of text including spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts.
Corpora have created a big impact on language description and analysis. With the advance of the new technologies, corpora and concordances became a valuable supply for each research and pedagogy (Perez-Llantada, 2009). Over the past few decades, there has been a growing interest in conducting corpus studies in the context of using corpus-based activities, data-driven language (DDL), and concordances in ELT (for example, Chao, 2010; Sun & Wang, 2003; Koosha & Jafarpour, 2006; Chan & Liou, 2005). The reason lying behind this growing interest is the advantages of using corpus-based materials in the classrooms.
To start with, concordances provide rich information on collocates, word families, and meanings. In addition, they also involve discovery learning and introduce vocabulary in real contexts. Moreover, learners investigate strategies, control their learning (Chapella & Hunston, 2001), and participate in the learning process actively. Corpus software produce word lists including cluster and collocation lists and count occurrences of individual search items (Farr, 2008).
This info will give students with information on lexical or grammatical patterns in sample sentences of real language (Koosha & Jafarpour, 2006). supported an oversized assortment of authentic materials and advanced software, corpus makes a simple and fast analysis of the best amounts of linguistic information possible, and therefore the learners are given a replacement approach to find out a language severally (Binkai, 2012). The use of corpus data in the 8 preparation of more accurate dictionaries and textbooks for students in the classroom is an example of indirect application (Wahid, 2011). Despite the growing recognition of the benefits of corpora in language teaching, corpora have not been used primarily in language lessons and some research studies have been conducted to investigate the benefits of using materials based on corpora in particular in the teaching of vocabulary in Viet Nam.
Therefore, more research is needed to discover the effectiveness of corpus- based materials in teaching vocabulary and student attitudes towards the use of corpus-based materials. use of corpus-based materials in vocabulary learning. Statement of the problem It is believed that the corpora are useful in language teaching primarily because of the authentic linguistic input. Unlike the inauthentic and artificial language used in most textbooks and dictionaries, the examples in the corpora represent the real language used by native speakers.
As a result, the corpora have been applied to language teaching and used for educational purposes for more than two decades. There is a growing interest in the conduct of body-based studies in the teaching of English. However, empirical studies in vocabulary education are very rare, especially in Viet Nam. To the knowledge of the instructor, there are not many studies that have been conducted to find out the effectiveness of corpus-based materials in vocabulary teaching.
As there is not enough empirical study in the Vietnamese context, the effects of corpus-based materials on vocabulary learning are not clear. There is a need to conduct more studies in this field to generalize the learning effect of the corpus-based vocabulary materials in the Vietnamese context. Hence, the present small-scale study intends to examine the effects of corpus-based activities in vocabulary teaching and to explore the attitudes of the students towards using corpus-based vocabulary activities in the Vietnamese context. The aim and scope of the study 9 The purpose of the study is to probe the effectiveness of corpus- grounded conditioning in vocabulary tutoring rather of using text conditioning and using wordbooks in vocabulary tutoring.
Another purpose of this study is to examine scholars' stations towards corpus- grounded vocabulary conditioning and text conditioning. Having these purposes in mind, the study has the following exploration questions: 1. How to produce word lists of the corpus by using a concordance package? 2. What are the effects of using corpus-based activities in vocabulary learning? 3.
What are the attitudes of Vietnamese learners towards using corpus- based vocabulary activities? 1. Assumptions and limitations of the study It is assumed that all the participants participate voluntarily in the study. It is also assumed that all the participants will answer the questions in the questionnaire and interview objectively and without bias. The study has some limitations.
Initially, it is limited to two groups of junior school learners in Hermann Gmeiner school in Da Lat. Therefore, the results of the study cannot be generalized for all language learners in Vietnam. If there had been more participants, the results would have been more reliable and generalizable. Another limitation of the study is that the treatment was conducted in six weeks because of time constraints.
Having a longer treatment period would be more helpful to understand the effectiveness of the corpus-based materials in vocabulary teaching. Terms and concepts Corpus “ A corpus is principally a collection of textbooks which is stored in a computer (McCarten, 2007 2).” 10 Corpus Linguistics “ Corpus Linguistics approaches the study of language in use through corpora. Corpus linguistics serves to answer two fundamental researching questions: 1. What particular patterns are associated with verbal or grammatical features? 2.
How do these patterns differ within kinds and registers” (Bennett, 2010 2)? Concordance “ A concordance is a list of surrounds illustrating a word or word family” (Chapelle & Hunston, 2001 111). Concordance is a system of assaying language by studying structures and verbal patterns plant in digital databases (Koosha & Jafarpour, 2006). Data- driven learning (DDL) It refers to the use of a corpus of textbooks with concordance software, to find answers to verbal questions by observing different uses of language (Allan, 2009). 11 CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW 2.
Introduction In this chapter, corpus linguistics, the historical backdrop of corpus, types of corpora, corpora in language teaching, and the corpus approach have been clarified, and then corpus-based vocabulary studies both in the world and Vietnam have been covered. Moreover, the effectiveness of corpus-based materials in vocabulary teaching has been examined along with related exploration in the field.