In this section, the present study narrows down the field from sports English to basketball English. First, published books for basketball English will be reviewed.
Second, the present study lists the strength and weakness of the published books of basketball English. Though all the books have their merits, one disadvantage shared by the published books is the lack of support from corpus.
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2.4.1 Published Books for Basketball English
Lee and Sien, two professors in I-shou university, compiled the book 英文烹小 鮮-美國職籃 in Taiwan. The book was published in 2014. The content of this book is composed of two hundred English sentences which come from NBA basketball news.
For each sentence, Chinese translation and some vocabulary items are provided.
What‟s more, there is a grammar teaching section below to teach some grammatical knowledge to the learners. For example, in the sentence “I have no idea why that was called an offensive foul.”, the author gives the Chinese translation of offensive foul and later on explains what the subject, object and subject complement are in that sentence.
The major advantage of this book is that it can help low proficiency English learners to learn English grammar explicitly by motivating them with sentences from NBA news. It also includes some basketball English words and phrases. However, there are not many basketball English vocabulary items mentioned in the study.
Collocation is also not taught in the book.
Published in 2012 in Taiwan, Wu and Hsu‟s Fast Break (快攻 NBA 籃球英文全 解) was a book written as a complete guide to NBA basketball English. The book was divided into six parts, including the introduction to NBA history, basketball rules, basketball jargon, basketball play-by-play, and basketball news.
In the first part, it introduces the history of NBA. For people who don‟t know much about the league, they can learn information related to all the 30 teams in the league. In addition, this part also explains how the league works like when a new regular season starts, and how the whole season is carried out.
In the second part, the book introduces some famous basketball players and some awards in the league. Roughly after reading this part, readers would have the basic
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knowledge of some basketball stars and some important awards for basketball players.
In the third part, basketball rules, players‟ positions, tactics and stats are included and introduced. For example, there is a clear picture displaying the whole basketball court and all the lines to further explain how the game is played on the court. In addition, this part also displays all the basketball rules which allow people to become familiar with the game.
In part four, readers could get to know the jargons related to basketball skills such as lay-up and jump shot. On top of that, there are also pictures of referee‟s signals to make people know the meanings of referee‟s gestures. Furthermore, this part also introduces some basketball related supplies such as ankle stabilizer and mouth guard. For some jargons, this part provides example sentences for readers‟
reference.
In the fifth part, readers could know how the game is reported by looking at the play-by-play. The sixth part of the book displays some basketball news for readers who want to know more about the league.
In sum, the book is very rich since it includes lots of information about
basketball English. The authors include words, phrases and some collocations in the book. Moreover, it also has Chinese translation for every English term. Many colorful pictures are also displayed to assist readers‟ comprehension. Therefore, the present study chose this book as the target for a corpus-based evaluation. With the help from corpus and concordancer, the present study aims to explore if there is still room for improvement for this book to enrich its lexical items coverage and collocations of basketball English.
2.4.2 Summary of the Books Related to Basketball English and Limitation
After reviewing some published books of teaching basketball English, it is
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obvious that they all have their pros and cons. Some books contain game news and many vocabulary items while others include even grammar teaching and sentence patterns into the books. As shown in Table 2, the merits of each reviewed book related to basketball English teaching are illustrated.
Table 2 : Merits of books teaching basketball English.
words phrases example sentence
According to Table 2, three books teaching basketball English all have their strengths. They teach the target learners some technical terms for basketball English.
Among them, Fast Break is the most robust one. In general, words, phrases, collocation, example sentences and Chinese translation are covered in Fast Break.
Rich as the basketball English teaching material is, there are still limitations which leave some room for improvement. The books published were compiled and written based on authors‟ personal experience and intuition. To be more straightforward, they
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may know a lot about basketball English and can put them into their books based on what they have learned and what they have known. However, personal learning
experience is not rich and objective enough compared to a well-established corpus full of a large amount of authentic text.
In order to provide a suggestion to overcome the limitations, the present study aims to make an evaluation of the most robust published basketball English teaching material Fast Break. To conduct the evaluation, the present work will build a large corpus of basketball English and use the concordancer Sketch Engine and item comparison tool Venny to complete the further analysis.
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CHAPTER THREE METHOD
In chapter three, the methodology applied in the present study will be illustrated, which includes the building process of the present basketball English corpus, the tool to analyze the corpus and the process of comparing between the web basketball
English corpus and the basketball English teaching material Fast Break. In section 3.1, detailed process and information about developing the basketball English corpus are presented. As for section 3.2, the web concordancer tool Sketch Engine and the functions used to analyze the corpus will be introduced. In section 3.3, the process and the tool applied to conduct the lexical items comparison between the web corpus and the teaching material will be mentioned.