8. Language skills
Activity 1
Pre-reading activity
Before you choose a text for yourself or your students to read, you might want to conduct some introductory analysis.
- Open Antconc
- Load Text 1.
- Generate a wordlist for this text. Can you guess what the text is about? How do you know?
- Which words would you like to pre-teach to your students? Discuss your answer with your peer. Exaplain your reasons.
- Generate a keyword list for the same text. Use FLOB_B as a reference corpus.
- Which of the two lists is more useful in deciding which words need to be pre-taught? Discuss your answer with your peer. Justify your answer
| Files |
| antconc3.2.4w.exe | ||
| FLOB_B.txt |
| Text1.txt |
Początek formularza
Dół formularza
Activity 2
Reading activity
- Share with your peer what you know about the event described in the text.
- Read the text at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20764906
Activity 3
Pre-reading
Now you will explore another tool for the pre-reading analysis.
- Open text 2. Copy it to the keyboard without reading.
- Go to WordandPhrase.Info site (http://www.wordandphrase.info). This time you will work with the Input/analyze text option.
- Paste the text in the left-handside window. Pres the search button.
- The statystical analysis of the text appear on the right. What does it say? Study each of the lists.
- Click on the >3000 list. The words appear in the bottom left window. Can you guess what the text is about?
- Study the words you find important. You can click on them to see their concordances.
| Text2.txt |
Activity 4
Reading
- Now read the text at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20782805.
- Prepare for a group discussion (for and against)
Activity 5
We will study this problem based on the example of writing research papers.
Research papers can be divided into 6 important parts (moves)
- background
- gap
- purpose
- method
- results
- conclusion
Each of these moves is characterised by certain ways of expression. Some of them are given in the table below:
| Move | Example |
| Background | This article presents the results of …
several studies have shown … |
| Gap | But, to date, very few …
… however … |
| Purpose | The goal/aim of the study is …
this article presents evidence of/reports on the findings of … the survey concerned … this study investigated/examined/compares/presents/explored/reported … the study was aimed at … |
| Method
Results |
The analysis is based on …
The research results provide … |
| Conclusion | it is argued that …
these findings lend support to … findings demonstrate/imply … the paper closes with a discussion of … this study reveals that … we suggest … it is proposed/posited that … the results may be/are interpreted that/as … … is confirmed … Possible accounts for the results include … |
Activity 6
Try to find more expressions to supplement the table. You will use our own small corpus of articles in applied linguistics. For the moment it consists of just 4 articles (it is far too few, but is is all I have managed to compile for today).
Load the corpus into Antconc. Run concordances for such words as
this article/goal/aim/results/analysis/(and others).
Find expressions which realize the moves discussed in the previous activity.
| Applied linguistics |
| AL1.txt | ||
| AL2.txt |
| LL1.txt | ||
| LL2.txt |
Activity 7
Explore other problems related to academic writing.
Analyzing academic writing: examples of queries:
- How do the writers state objectives in the RAs? (Examine the concordances for the words “study” and “investig*”, where the asterisk stands for any letters.)
- What tense is used for presenting the objectives?
- What syntactic pattern can you find in the stating of the objectives by the RA writers?
- What reference verbs are used to review earlier research? (As the authors usually include a reference to the year of publication in brackets or parentheses, use the search item “(*)”.)
- How do the RA writers explain the necessity for doing the current research? (Examine the concordance for the words “however”, “nevertheless” and “not”.)
- Where do the writers mark their presence in the RA? (Search for the concordances of the key words “I” and “we”.)
- How are the findings expressed in the RAs? (Examine the concordances for the words “finding*” and “result*”.)
- Where in the text do the authors decrease the assertiveness of their statements? (Examine the concordances for the auxiliary verbs “may”, “might”, “can”, “could”, lexical verbs “suggest”, “seem”, “appear”, and adjectives “possible”, “likely”.)
- Where in the text do the authors increase the assertiveness of their statements? (Examine the concordances for the words “definitely”, “obviously”, “demonstrate”.)
- What tense is used to express findings, results and conclusions? (Expand the concordancesfor the words “finding*” and “result*” to three words to the right.)
Use our in-house small academic corpus and the academic sections of BNC and COCA:
Activity 8
Explore the posiibilities offered by the Backbone corpus: