BRUCE, Nigel James (Dept. of Law and Business HK Shue Yan University) CHOW, Wilson (The University of Hong Kong) http://citers2013.cite.hku.hk/en/paper_625.htm --------------------------- Author(s) bear(s) the responsibility in case of any infringement of the Intellectual Property Rights of third parties. --------------------------- CITE was notified by the author(s) that if the presentation slides contain any personal particulars, records and personal data (as defined in the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance) such as names, email addresses, photos of students, etc, the author(s) have/has obtained the corresponding person's consent.

1. CITE Research Symposium 2013: May 10-11
“Transformative Technologies, Learning
Environment and Partnership”
Corpus consultation & Concordancing:
Promoting academic literacy via the Web
Nigel Bruce, Dept. of Law & Business, HKSYU,
and Wilson Chow, CAES, HKU.
Contact email: nbruce@hksyu.edu

2. Role of literacy development in ESL H.E.
ESL-medium universities need to think less about
“language” issues and more about “literacy”
development among their students.
Disciplinary literacy needs developing alongside
content knowledge
 but direct teaching is not the answer
A self-directed approach is needed to promote
academic literacy development in
ESL-medium disciplinary curricula.

3. Reduced contact  Greater autonomy
ESL-medium universities/programmes
need to create more diverse self-access
learning resources to help their
students become more autonomous
learners
Students need more IT-based data-
driven learning (DDL) avenues like
corpus consultation.

4. From prescription to description
Proposal?: Corpus Consultation & Concordancing
In place of a teacher-intensive prescriptive
approach, teaching students what to learn and
when…  we need….
Learner- and activity-centred approaches
to learning. These favour a descriptive, literacy-
based approach, based on actual examples of how
language is used, for what purposes & in what ways.

5. From prescription to description
Proposal?: Corpus Consultation & Concordancing
In place of a teacher-intensive prescriptive
approach, teaching students what to learn and
when…  we need….
Learner- and activity-centred approaches
to learning. These favour a descriptive, literacy-
based approach, based on actual examples of how
language is used, for what purposes & in what ways.

6. From prescription to description
Proposal?: Corpus Consultation & Concordancing
In place of a teacher-intensive prescriptive
approach, teaching students what to learn and
when…  we need….
Learner- and activity-centred approaches
to learning. These favour a descriptive, literacy-
based approach, based on actual examples of how
language is used, for what purposes & in what ways.

7. Powerful – but too broad-spectrum

8. Wow!!

9. A Discipllne-specific Concordancing Program

10. The Home Page – Tutorial located here

11. The corpus of Legal
Texts: mainly Case
Reports, showing
how legal terms are
used most frequently
in judicial discourse
– e.g.. the most
common patterns in
use in Contract &
Tort cases
First…. The Corpus…

12. This signals the “looping”
mechanism, allowing 2
Options for refining your
search
Then… Corpus Consultation

13. Again, notice that every term
appearing in this set of results is
hotlinked – i.e. if you want to refine
your search by looking at a different
combination of terms, you simply click
that (black) term…
Colour coding functions:
Red: your search terms
Purple: what you are looking for
Green: contiguous terms – click to refine in Option 1
Black: all other terms: click to make split (Option 2) search

14. Again, notice that every term
appearing in this set of results is
hotlinked – i.e. if you want to refine
your search by looking at a different
combination of terms, you simply click
that (black) term…
Colour coding functions:
Red: your search terms
Purple: what you are looking for
Green: contiguous terms – click to refine in Option 1
Black: all other terms: click to make split (Option 2) search
EVERY term is HOTLINKED

15. How basic grammar informs searches
LegalEasy assumes an understanding of
basic word order in English:
Nouns.…Verbs.…Nouns

16. i.e. if you want to refine your search by looking at
a different combination of terms, you can click
that (black) term, and the Concordancer goes to
Option 2….but results are so far poor;
effectively this kind of search requires a
far bigger database than we have at present
Limitation

17. The 3-stop shop approach

18. The 3-stop shop approach

19. The 3-stop shop approach

20. The 3-stop shop approach
The Handout contains technical
information about how Wilson
Chow designed and runs this
Concordancer. As our time is
limited, Wilson will be happy to
field any technical questions after
this presentation