tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post673126498727768736..comments2024-03-19T05:42:25.442+00:00Comments on Leoxicon: One is better than noneLeohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16077987567636970527noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-19737192739577357052020-04-22T01:34:30.227+01:002020-04-22T01:34:30.227+01:00I don't think most people who are not English ...I don't think most people who are not English teachers would understand what she meant. The more imaginative my speculate, and possibly truly, but many would just shake their heads and try another line of inquiry to find out what she was trying to say. And that would be on the charitable end of the continuum! To say words collocate is merely to say that they appear together frequently. When we encourage our students to use collocations we are doing so because it increases their chances of being understood by native speakers. If we sift through the written and oral (recorded) histories of languages we are probably going to find tokens of an almost inconceivable number of word combinations. many of the sentences our students produce are grammatical and, if based on this definition of precedent, meaningful too. Does that mean the clerk in 7-11 will understand them? Again, I don't think so ... D Sansonihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15763964049102430958noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-20682707355069539542017-01-16T04:31:43.408+00:002017-01-16T04:31:43.408+00:00Thank you for your comment, Kelly (and sorry for m...Thank you for your comment, Kelly (and sorry for my belated response).<br />Sounds like a great activity. I don't know why though it has to be NEW words - I think known vocabulary would do just as well. I'm going to try it!<br />Leohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16077987567636970527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-88500258858647378002016-12-18T20:18:08.543+00:002016-12-18T20:18:08.543+00:00Great article, Leo! This topic brings to my mind a...Great article, Leo! This topic brings to my mind an activity suggested to me by John Sivell of Brock University's Department of Applied Linguistics. Students choose a few of the new words from the text being studied and find as many synonyms as they can for each. Then they ask themselves and each other whether each synonym can or cannot substitute for the original. I have done this with my multilevel seniors class, and it was provoked a lot of good discussion re collocation, nuance, register, etc.Kellyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08182881635816655061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-81437146707916643782016-12-16T11:50:07.906+00:002016-12-16T11:50:07.906+00:00Hi Leo,
If you sort the result in the url by date,...Hi Leo,<br />If you sort the result in the url by date, rather than relevance, you get the most recent books first. These include recent fiction, history etc books. It's still the case (as I said myself) that it seems to be used a lot in legal contexts, but definitely also other more mainstream genres. I find two cites in COCA and two in the NOW corpus (i.e. uses this year). 'Lateral roads' also yields results and has the handy side-effect of excluding the proper noun use for the name of an actual road in Bhutan. <br />It is, of course, not a strong collocate of 'lateral'. If you had searched for collocates of 'road' instead of collocates of 'lateral', I think you would have got a more helpful result for your student, as 'side' is #3 with 2,738 uses, and given that a standard dictionary definition of the first sense of 'lateral' is, basically, 'side', you could have said, well, I've never heard of a 'lateral road', though it is used in quite a lot of contexts and it's quite clear what you mean to anyone who knows the core sense of lateral (i.e. side), I think more people will understand what you mean if you say 'side road', because that's more common.<br />You ask whether I think you were wrong to tell her she was wrong. Whether you were right or wrong was never really my point. I just wanted to point out (as I point out to myself often) that the limits of one's own lexical arsenal are not the limits of the language's. But yes, since you said this:<br />"I can imagine "lateral" meaning something like "side", "branch" or "offshoot" in other languages, hence my student's conclusion that a "lateral road" would be a possible collocation in English."<br />Since 'lateral' means something like 'side', 'branch' in English too, you were wrong to say it doesn't work in English. There was no need for speculation about transfer etc. because 'lateral' means what she thought it meant and most people would understand what she meant, even if they'd never encountered the term.<br />Really looking forward to your post on ideolect, Leo! I always find your writing engaging. And thanks for this post, which was very thoght-provoking!<br /><br />Diane Nichollshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15706213009680816525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-35367184622345598192016-12-16T09:58:19.725+00:002016-12-16T09:58:19.725+00:00Thank you, Bret. Glad you're 'bookmarking&...Thank you, Bret. Glad you're 'bookmarking' my post for future reference.<br />LLeohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16077987567636970527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-35785971939665740522016-12-16T09:49:55.584+00:002016-12-16T09:49:55.584+00:00Thank you for your comment.
I agree that more is...Thank you for your comment. <br /><br />I agree that more is more and providing whole sentences with follow-on sentences and thus exposing Ss to colligation /grammatical patterns etc. is much better than just collocation. But when there is a time pressure, a cursory collocation/chunk is better than a cursory single word gloss, don't you think?<br /><br />Glad you're enjoying my posts!<br />Leohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16077987567636970527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-87101625451964656232016-12-16T09:44:23.672+00:002016-12-16T09:44:23.672+00:00Hi, Diane
I very much doubt she looked it up in a...Hi, Diane<br /><br />I very much doubt she looked it up in a corpus (I wish she had!) but I did and couldn't find ROAD in the list of collocates of "lateral" in COCA, even after increasing the no. of hits to 500 (under Options). Now I know, of course, that corpus doesn't provide negative evidence, i.e. it doesn't mean that "lateral+road" is not possible. <br /><br />I followed your link, which I repost here for other readers to see: <br /><br /><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22lateral+road%22&tbs=bks:1,cdr:1&num=100&lr=lang_en&gws_rd=cr&ei=psJPWJ3XKsmfgAaLrrLwAw" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22lateral+road%22&tbs=bks:1,cdr:1&num=100&lr=lang_en&gws_rd=cr&ei=psJPWJ3XKsmfgAaLrrLwAw</a><br />(somehow commmenters's links do not come out as hyperlinks and are not clickable)<br /><br />Most of the uses of "lateral road" in Google Book search are in law books dating from the 19th century - hardly the use she was going for. So I don't think my guidance or "correction" was entirely wrong. Or do you think it was?<br /><br />Thank you for joining the discussion and reminding me that I've been meaning to blog about idiolect.<br /><br />L<br /><br />Leohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16077987567636970527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-5061552182186782772016-12-14T13:24:51.366+00:002016-12-14T13:24:51.366+00:00This is an excellent post and provides solutions t...This is an excellent post and provides solutions to vocabulary issues I have been struggling with lately. I plan to keep this stored as I work on revamping my vocabulary instruction as I feel you have provided a strong and well-researched guide for vocabulary acquisition. Thank you!Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08164536107529974433noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-55319666311563182032016-12-14T07:56:45.973+00:002016-12-14T07:56:45.973+00:00Great post Leo. L1 transference is a massive probl...Great post Leo. L1 transference is a massive problem with teachers constantly having to tell students: "because that'she the way it IS in English so you must learn the words patterns, how it behaves,collocates and colligates. I've started highlighting and emphasising how colligation and cotext are essential to learning new lexis which means boarding words and collocations with their grammatical patterns and cotext (dialogues,or follow-on sentences). More is more so it's a win win situation. As teachers we need to go beyond the cursory collocation or chuck and start becoming attentive to how certain lexis colligates and generates cotext around it. Teaching collocations and chunks isn'enough. Love your posts, keep them comingAnonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05066955106647683806noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-52987955091860557852016-12-13T10:15:14.883+00:002016-12-13T10:15:14.883+00:00Perhaps the student googled 'lateral road'...Perhaps the student googled 'lateral road' or looked in a corpus? 'lateral road' appears to be a more technical and possibly more US English alternative for 'side road' or 'branch road' and is certainly valid. Here are some google books results:<br />https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22lateral+road%22&tbs=bks:1,cdr:1&num=100&lr=lang_en&gws_rd=cr&ei=psJPWJ3XKsmfgAaLrrLwAw<br /><br />I've done this myself when doing learner corpus error annotation - assumed a word or structure was wrong because I personally didn't know or use it. I used to think 'an opportunity *of* doing something' was wrong, and correct it to 'opportunity to do something'.<br />In this case, the student wasn't *wrong*.<br />I think it's important when asked these 'can I say' questions, to check not against one's own internal 'corpus' but against what's out there outside of our ideolect or our world knowledge.<br />Diane Nichollshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15706213009680816525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-60216109953512291472016-12-12T10:23:21.606+00:002016-12-12T10:23:21.606+00:00Thank you for your comment. Good idea to record wh...Thank you for your comment. Good idea to record what students would say.<br /><br />Regarding the lateral road, her L1 is Romanian actually (which also belongs to the Romance family), but she hardly uses it. Her L2 is Hebrew; so English is her L3. So it could be the case of translation from L1 (your hypothesis) or it could be the case that she went home, looked up "lateral" in a dictionary, disassembled the chunk as it were, and then tried to build a new utterance in class.<br /><br />Leohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16077987567636970527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-60104186566011436162016-12-12T02:33:47.289+00:002016-12-12T02:33:47.289+00:00Thanks Leo. I try to get students to think about a...Thanks Leo. I try to get students to think about and record what they'd actual say with new items of vocabulary in addition to nothing down information about the meaning of the item.<br /><br />Regarding the question of the lateral road, I wonder if the student was a Spanish speaker translating from the L1. Here in Mexico, 'el lateral' / ' carriles laterales' refer(s) to the lanes that run alongside a high speed main road and are used get on /off the main and to provide access to the buildings, businesses, neighborhoods etc situated next to the main road. Funnily enough, to provide a nice example of your ideas in practice, I can't think of a good translation of carriles laterales that sounds natural in English, but, more importantly, I know exactly what to do when the GPS on my phone tells me to a 'salir a los carriles laterales'.<br /><br />MAhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13033286162987431282noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-73976464983910213362016-12-11T21:35:16.405+00:002016-12-11T21:35:16.405+00:00Hi Sharon,
Would like to hear more Have you writte...Hi Sharon,<br />Would like to hear more Have you written up anything about it over on your blog?Leohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16077987567636970527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-35115390076166764682016-12-11T21:33:27.133+00:002016-12-11T21:33:27.133+00:00I see what you mean about students not understandi...I see what you mean about students not understanding (at first) the value of revisiting supposedly known vocab. As a wise man said, revision and recycling does take a lot of time, but it's time well spent!Leohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16077987567636970527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-72640213423285254262016-12-11T21:31:30.560+00:002016-12-11T21:31:30.560+00:00Thank you for stopping by and for your comment, Pe...Thank you for stopping by and for your comment, Peter! <br />Leohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16077987567636970527noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-242093944889657062016-12-11T18:05:36.265+00:002016-12-11T18:05:36.265+00:00Couldn't agree more Leo, one is definitely bet...Couldn't agree more Leo, one is definitely better than none, and quality of elaboratin is better than quantity of superficial study! This year my advanced learners have been working systematically with the SkeLL corpus in class precisely to develop their awaremess of mid frequency collocation and the results are quite exciting. At least they are to me :-)<br />Shartlehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06999750634020105190noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-16586825374740278382016-12-11T14:05:40.690+00:002016-12-11T14:05:40.690+00:00Great article Leo! Congrats! As a certified langua...Great article Leo! Congrats! As a certified language coach I've been implementing some of the lastest discoveries for vocab learning from the neurolinguistic perspective (learning deeply in a more proactive way, using learnt vocabulary in a more personalized way, reuse new words in different contexts and revisiting them from time to time (at least 5 times) it's time consuming and it sometimes gives students the perception that we're not going forward since we're constant revisiting "learnt" vocabulary. However, results have been amazing. As you said, one is better than none. I'm finally seeing some results as opposed to pages and pages of notes that students will never be able to thoroughly assimilate/use. ernestosantanahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07836284902026846935noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5759462792103754770.post-13995882969661064472016-12-11T10:42:13.378+00:002016-12-11T10:42:13.378+00:00Having come across the idea that words sharing pat...Having come across the idea that words sharing patterns can and do share 'aspects' of meaning (Francis & Hunston), I often searched in vain for individual items which shared collocations, alas a search often in vain. Interesting article and cheers for the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.Peterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14689437746943449918noreply@blogger.com