An Exploration of Vocabulary Knowledge in English Short Talks- A Corpus-Driven Approach

Yu-Chia Wang

doi:10.5539/ijel.v2n4p33

Abstract

Adopting a corpus-driven approach, the study aimed to explore the vocabulary knowledge in English short talks including word patterns, features, and usages that are most likely to be encountered by language users in the real context. A specific corpus TED was conducted through a collection of English talks that are less than 20 minutes from the website TED Talks. In addition, the existed corpus BASE (British Academic Spoken English) was included in the study as a sample of talks longer than 20 minutes. Applying three corpus tools, AntConc (Anthony, 2003), RANGE (Nation & Heartkey, 2002), and KfNgram (Fletcher, 2007), the researcher was able to compile frequency-ordered word lists, concordance lines, vocabulary coverage, and lists of lexical bundles. The results showed that although the most frequently-used words in TED corpus and BASE corpus were similar grammatical items, the order was quite different. Moreover, the chi-square test showed a significant difference among four pronouns I, You, We, They between the two corpora and also in different parts of the TED corpus. Finally, the results of concordance lines and lexical bundles presented the “typical” and “frequent” word usages in the beginning, middle, and ending part of English short talks. It is suggested that teachers can build their own corpus to meet specific teaching purposes or learner’s needs, and to generate the corpus results into classroom materials while teaching English short talks.

Highlights

For the past thirty years, corpus linguistics has been practiced a lot in the field of second language acquisition, providing teachers and researchers another way of choosing the more “authentic” and “communicative” materials in teaching and making the learning of language more fun and interesting
Adopting a corpus-driven approach, the study aimed to explore the vocabulary knowledge in English short talks including word patterns, features, and usages that are most likely to be encountered by language users in the real context
In order to give an appropriate public talk in a target language, does one need the knowledge of linguistic rules, he or she is required to adopt the proper “register”, which is defined as the usage of a language for a specific purpose or for a particular setting

Summary

Introduction

For the past thirty years, corpus linguistics has been practiced a lot in the field of second language acquisition, providing teachers and researchers another way of choosing the more “authentic” and “communicative” materials in teaching and making the learning of language more fun and interesting. Under this framework, we are able to investigate the “language” native speakers practice in both written and spoken forms. By investigating the “authentic” language used by native speakers or “frequent” users of that target language beforehand can teachers provide their students sufficient information about the kind of skills they need for demonstrating the challenging task

Methods

Results

Conclusion