Memory Strategy – Using Mental Images
(Adapted from forthcoming “Loong Y & Chan S W L, A Study of Vocabulary Learning
Strategies Adopted by Dentistry Students in Hong Kong In Learning Specialized Dental
Vocabulary, September 2012, Asian ESP Journal”)
Memory Strategy – The Keyword Technique
Step One: Think of a
word that you know that
has a similar sound
(audionym
“Keyword” )
Step Two: Create a
mental image to link up
the Keyword with the
target word
(Adapted from Brahler, C. J. & Walker, D. (2008). Learning scientific and medical
terminology with a mnemonic strategy using an illogical association technique. Advances in
Physiology Education, 32, 219-224.)
The “keyword” technique
Japanese
word and
meaning
kurai (dark)
karada (body)
English
Link and visual
word that image created
has a
similar
sound
The “keyword” technique
Japanese
word and
meaning
English
Link and visual
word that image created
has a
similar
sound
kurai (dark)
cry
A baby cries
when it is dark
karada (body) colored
a colored body
Kurai - Cry

Imagine the visual of a
baby crying when it’s
dark
Karada - colored

a colored body
Use of Concordancers

A corpus (plural corpora) – a large collection of
texts, written or spoken, stored on a computer.

A concordancer – a computer programme used
to search this database
Considerations





General English / Academic English /
Specialised English (e.g. medical, law, 1K and
2K graded, UWW corpora on Compleat
Lexical Tutor http://www.lextutor.ca/)?
Written / Spoken?
Size?
Currency?
Free of charge?
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Corpus Size

“I don’t think there can be any corpora,
however large, that contain information about
all of the areas of English….that I want to
explore [but] every corpus that I’ve had a chance
to examine, however small, has taught me facts
that I couldn’t imagine finding out about in any
other way.” (Fillmore, 1992, p. 35)
Use of Corpora

Word lists and dictionary entries (different
senses of a word / typical examples of usage /
frequency information) are compiled by
computational linguists using a corpus of the
language.


E.g. the COBUILD project was the first project using a
computerised corpus for dictionary making
in the 1980s, Collins started to use a computerised corpus
(then called the COBUILD corpus) with John Sinclair of
University of Birmingham; now the Collins Cobuild Corpus
has 2.5 billion words (part of which is the Bank of English
Corpus)
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Major Corpora

Matching exercise
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Major corpus: BNC





100 million words
Written (90%) and spoken (10%) samples
British English from the 1980’s to 1993
General English
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
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Major corpus: Brown corpus





1 million words
American English
One of the earliest corpora / compiled in 1960s
500 text samples from 15 text categories
Searchable through Compleat Lexical Tutor at
http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concor
d_e.html
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Major corpus: Bank of English






Part of Collins Cobuild Corpus
450 million words as of 2005 (650 million words
as of 2012)
75% written and 25% spoken
70% British, 20% American and 10% others
Contemporary English
http://www.titania.bham.ac.uk/docs/svenguide.
html
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Major Corpus: The Corpus of
Contemporary American English
(COCA)



Contemporary American English containing
about 450 million words (from 1990 to 2011)
five genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazines,
newspapers, and academic journals
http://www.americancorpus.org/
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Major corpus: MICASE




Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
started in 1997
contains transcripts and audio files of academic
speech
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/
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Some user-friendly concordancers
1.
2.
3.
4.
Word Neighbors (developed by University of
Science and Technology)
www.just-the-word.com
COCA (needs registration)
Create your own concordance using tools
provided by CAES, HKU:

http://www4.caes.hku.hk/vocabulary/tools_cp.htm
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Tasks - answers



The public have expressed concern about … /
… are of great concern to the public
Improve / increase / promote efficency
Substitute for
How can corpora be used in the
classroom?

Among these suggestions by Nicholas Medley,
which ones are applicable in your classroom?
Using Word Neighbours

Which 3 nouns come most frequently after
“underlying”? Then, compare your results with
examples from a dictionary.

How to use the phrase “not only … but (also)
…”
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Answers
Word Neighbours:
 Underlying cause/s
 Underlying assumptions
 Underlying principle
Cambridge Dictionary Online:
 Underlying significance




Not only (verb) but also (verb)
Not only (noun) but also (noun)
Not only (adjective) but also (adjective)
Not only (prep + noun) but also (prep + noun)
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How can concordancers be used to
facilitate vocabulary learning/teaching?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
See which words are low-frequency words (off-list words
using Vocab Profiler) to see which words are likely to cause
difficulty (can pre-teach these words), and see whether a
text is likely to cause difficulty to students.
Study words in context and increase depth of processing
Check grammatical behaviour of words e.g. what
prepositions to use after a verb
Check collocations and lexical patterns
Find out about the frequencies of words / word
combinations
Find out about usage of a word in different text types (e.g.
fiction vs academic / spoken vs written), e.g. by using
“Range” on Compleat Lexical Tutor
Preparation for next class


Give an oral outline of your assignment
Can consider:

Conference abstracts of JALT Vocabulary
Symposium (2012) (post-session 4 reading)
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