Beyond Web VP:
New ways of using Lextutor
Marti Sevier
Simon Fraser University
TESL Canada
October 14, 2012
Overview
 What is Lextutor?
 Why? Learning outcomes/rationale
 How can it be used? A sequence of tasks
 How would you like to use it?
 References
 Questions/contact
What is Lextutor?
Using Lextutor
Learning outcomes/rationale
 Text analysis: identify vocabulary
items for teaching and learning
 Practice based on…
 Multiple exposures
 Multiple, authentic contexts
 Opportunities for deep processing
Expansion of vocabulary
knowledge:
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Meaning in different contexts
Word families
Collocation
Register
Grammatical associations (colligation)
Etc.
Background:
A brief word about word lists
 GSL: 1953, West, rev. 1995, Bauman
& Culligan –2000 headwords
 UWL: 1984, Xue & Nation
 AWL: 2000, Coxhead 570 headwords
 BNL: 2005, Neufeld & Billuroglu—
2709 words
 BNC-20: 2010, Cobb—20,000 words
Background: corpora
What is a corpus?
 A corpus is a collection of texts of written (or spoken)
language presented in electronic form. It provides the
evidence of how language is used in real situations, from
which lexicographers can write accurate and meaningful
dictionary entries. By analysing the corpus and using
special software, we can see words in context and find
out how new words and senses are emerging, as well as
spotting other trends in usage, spelling, world English,
and so on.
Source: About the Oxford English Corpus,
http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/aboutcorpus
Corpora and word lists
 GSL: partially corpus-based but also compilation of
words voted upon by committee --2000 words
 UWL: compilation of 4 lists: Lynn (1973), Campion
and Elley (1971), (corpus-based), and Ghadessy
(1979), and Praninskas (1972) (lists based on
student annotations of words in texts).
 AWL: corpus-based: academic texts in arts,
commerce, law, and science (3.5 million running
words)
 BNL: based on commonly used word lists which are
corpus-based, the Brown Corpus (1 m. words from
range of written sources), and the British National
Corpus (BNC) (100 million words from written and
spoken sources)
 BNC-20: based on British National Corpus
How can Lextutor be used?
A sequence of tasks
1. KeyWords, WebVP: identify words for
study
2. ID output: word recognition, spelling
3. Cloze: meaning, context, collocation,
colligation
4. Familizer: word families
5. Concordancer: collocation, text
patterns
6. GroupLex: all of the above...and more
Take one text:
Plight of the Yangtze
 Text analysis tools: selecting words
1. KeyWords Extractor
Take one text:
Plight of the Yangtze
 Text analysis tools: selecting words
1. KeyWords Extractor
22 key words (proper nouns eliminated)
freshwater maritime drought province navigate
bureau lake river species pollute ship fish factory
reach water previous city continue short include
direct total
Take one text:
Plight of the Yangtze--1
 Text analysis tools: selecting words
Web Vocabulary Profiler (Web VP)
Take one text:
Plight of the Yangtze--1
 Text analysis tools: selecting words
Web Vocabulary Profiler (Web VP)
AWL
GSL K1: city continue direct factory fish
include lake reach river ship short total
water
GSL: K2: 0
AWL: previous
OFF LIST: bureau drought freshwater
maritime navigate pollute province
species
Take one text:
Plight of the Yangtze--2
 Text analysis tools: selecting
words: the BNL
Take one text:
Plight of the Yangtze--2
 Text analysis tools: selecting words
BNL
bnl-1 city continue direct include previous reach
short total water
bnl-2 factory river ship
bnl-3 fish lake
bnl-4 decline
bnl-5 central meters statistics
bnl-6 species
OFF LIST freshwater maritime drought province
navigate bureau pollute
Take one text:
Plight of the Yangtze--3
 Text analysis tools: selecting
words: the BNC-20
Take one text:
Plight of the Yangtze--3
BNC-20
 BNC 1000: city continue direct fish include
previous short total water
 BNC-2,000: factory reach river ship
 BNC-3,000: lake pollute species
 BNC-4,000: bureau province
 BNC-5,000: drought
 BNC-6,000: navigate
 BNC-8,000: maritime
A couple of caveats:
 Infrequent ≠ difficult/necessary
 Teacher knowledge is key
 Curricular/syllabus demands
12 words…
drought maritime navigation
reaches
factories species
bureau
levels
include
continue director pollute
Application 1:
I-D Word identification quiz
Rationale:
 Word recognition/spelling
 Increases speed of recognition
 Provides multiple contexts for words
Application 2: rational cloze passage
 Why cloze?
 learners appear to like it, and
 [it can] train learners to read and rewrite
a text with a vocabulary focus (Lee,
2008)
 Requires reader to use contextual clues
to fill in gaps (Raymond, 1988)
…and a second cloze
 Video cloze
 Caveat: keep length short, about 2-3
minutes
 How to:
 Go to page source, search “embedurl” (no
quotes)
 Copy the link without quotation marks and
paste into create page
Application 3: A word and more
words: familizer
… rather than talking about “knowing a
word”, we should be talking about
“knowing a word family” (Nation
2001:47).
========================
12 words: drought maritime navigation
reaches
factories species
bureau
levels
include
continue director pollute
Familizer output
12 words: drought maritime navigation drastic
reaches factories statistics species decline
percent bureau levels marine chemical
director
76
bureau bureaus
continue continual continually continuance continued continuity continues continuing continuous
continuously continuation continuations
direct directed undirected directing directly director directors directorship directorships directs indirect
indirectly directness directnesses
drought droughts
factory factories
include included includes including incl inclusive inclusion
level levelled leveller levelling leveled leveler leveling levels levelly
maritime
navigate navigated navigating navigates navigation navigations navigational navigator navigators
circumnavigate circumnavigates circumnavigated circumnavigating circumnavigation
pollute pollutes polluted polluting polluter polluters pollutant pollutants pollution pollutions antipollution
reach reached reaches reaching
species
Application 4: the concordancer
 Collocation: “two or more words that
occur frequently together” (Shin &
Nation, 2007, 41)
 Why?
1. develop greater fluency
2. Achieve “naturalness”, e.g.
“do my best” vs. “try my best”
Concordancer
 Our word list again: drought maritime
navigation drastic reaches factories
statistics species decline percent
bureau levels marine chemical
director
Compare collocation in the passage to
collocation in a concordancer
Concordancer: language analysis
 What are two different meanings of
“reaches” in the passage?
 Water in the upper reaches decreased by
over 60 percent from the previous year…
 ….. in the middle reaches of the river.
 Water depth at Yichang and Jingjiang in the
middle reaches of the river no longer
reaches the navigation standard of 2.9
meters
 Which use is more common?
Compare to the concordance lines.
Concordancer: “reaches”
 Out of 53 concordance lines, only about
10% use “reaches” as it is used in the
passage.
 Questions for students to consider”
 Part of speech: noun or verb?
 If a noun: singular or plural?
 Context: in what type of texts might ths
word be used? To what topics is it related?

Note: use “all of the above under
“Corpus”.
Concordancer: comparison
 Ask Ss to check collocations by typing into
concordancer
X Students who cram for tests have increased risk for
psychological harm.

OR Collect common collocation errors: mix with
correct collocations: use “extract” to pull up
examples.
We then run the risk of being injured.
Students who cram for tests have increased risk for psychological
harm.
A message runs … a risk of being distorted if it is to be relayed
more than about six..times.
NOTE: Consider whether you are looking for a collocation to the
left or to the right of the word. Here it is “left” because we
want to look at the word/s that FOLLOW risk.
Putting it together: GroupLex
Student-driven learning
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–
–
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New or recycled vocabulary
Interactive: Ss set quizzes in pairs, trade
Personalized: focus on “their” area
Multiconc option: increased exposure,
contexts
– Easy to monitor
– Contact Tom Cobb to set up a site for your
students.
Now you try it / Questions?
After thoughts
 Marti’s contact: msevier@sfu.ca
 Tom Cobb’s contact:
cobb.tom@uqam.ca (for Grouplex
setup—takes about a week)
 Join Lextutor on FB!