使用專業語料庫增加籃球英語教材詞彙及搭配詞的豐富度

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩士論文 Master‟s Thesis Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University. 使用專業語料庫增加籃球英語教材詞彙及搭配詞的豐富度 Using a Specialized Web Corpus to Enrich the Lexical Items and Collocations of a Basketball English Teaching Material. 指導教授：陳浩然博士 Advisor：Dr. Hao-Jan Chen 研究生：高睿禹 Jui-Yu Kao. 中華民國一百零六年八月 August, 2017.

(2) 中文摘要近幾十年，專業英語在英語教學越來越受到重視。而專業英語的教材像是學術英文字表以及工程學英文字表也在教學以及研究上有許多貢獻。但是跟運動英語相關的研究卻比較少。在籃球方面，美國職業籃球一直是最廣為人知且最受歡迎的。台灣也有許多美國職籃的愛好者，他們喜歡看英語的直播比賽以及相關新聞。但是大多數人所學的一般英文卻沒有包含像是籃板球這樣的籃球英語專業用語，這使得他們在看英語直播比賽以及新聞時產生理解障礙。雖然市面上有些籃球英語的教科書，但都是由作者們依照自己的經驗以及知識所編寫而成，而沒有語料庫的輔助。鑒於此，本篇研究要以網路籃球英文語料庫來增進一本市售籃球英語教材裡面的單字，片語及搭配詞的豐富度。本研究首先借助網路語料庫技術建置約七千萬字的大型籃球英文相關語料庫，語料庫的內容都來自網路上與籃球英語相關的文章。透過網路語料庫技術，本研究接著再取出籃球英語語料庫中的高頻率單字及片語跟一本籃球英語教材內的所有單字片語作比較。除了單字片語之外，本研究也挑選了一些籃球英語教材以及籃球英語語料庫共同的單字，並比較其搭配詞的異同。在單字片語的比較方面，比較結果顯示出籃球英語語料庫中有許多和籃球英語相關的高頻率單字以及片語並沒有收錄在籃球英語教科書中。而在共同單字的搭配詞比較上。結果顯示網路籃球英語語料庫比籃球英語教材能提供更多搭配詞。除了比較之外，本研究也整合了一份籃球英語字表及詞表以供參考。本研究不只期待能提供語料庫技術來增加籃球英語教材內容的豐富度，也希望藉由所編撰的籃球英語字表及詞表來幫助想教授籃球英語給學生的教師以及對籃球英語有興趣的自學者，讓他們不只能學習到市售教材的基本詞彙，也能藉由本研究開拓籃球英語的視野。. 關鍵詞：專業英語、網路語料庫、籃球英語、詞彙表 I.

(3) Abstract In recent decades, ESP (English for Specific Purpose) has received more and more attention in TESOL. ESP teaching materials such as Coxhead‟s Academic Word List and Ward‟s Engineering Word List have contributed a lot to both pedagogy and research. However, few studies have been done on sports English. For basketball, NBA (National Basketball Association) is the most famous and popular league in the basketball filed in the world. Many Taiwanese basketball fans like to watch the live games broadcast in English. For people equipped with basic and general English competence, many technical terms and special usages like rebound often hinder their comprehension when watching English basketball games or related news. Though there are some teaching materials of basketball English like published books, those books are written by the authors‟ intuition and personal experience without the support of a robust corpus. The purpose of the present thesis is to use a specialized web basketball English corpus to enrich the lexical items and collocations in a basketball English published book. To have a robust foundation, this thesis built a web basketball English corpus with the help of Sketch Engine. The corpus contains about 70 million words. With the functions of concordance software Sketch Engine, the present study compared the high frequent phrases and words in the basketball English corpus with the words and phrases in the teaching material Fast Break. In addition, the current study also compared the collocations of common words between the teaching material and the web corpus. For the words and phrases comparison, results indicated that there were many high frequent words and phrases in the web corpus not included in the basketball English teaching material. For the collocation comparison, the current study found that web corpus can provide more collocates than the teaching material. The present II.

(4) research also compiled a basketball English word list and phrase list based on the teaching material and the web basketball English corpus for reader‟s reference. The findings of the present research are expected not only to benefit the basketball English teaching material by providing specialized web corpus as a way to enrich its content but also to offer helps to teachers who want to incorporate basketball English into their courses. People who want to learn basketball English by themselves can also refer to the present basketball English word list and phrase list to explore the basketball English.. Key Words: ESP, Web Corpus, Basketball English, Lexical Item List. III.

(5) ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank many people for their support during the process of writing my thesis. The first and the most important one is Prof. Hao-Jan, Howard Chen. I felt lucky to be his student because he gave me the chance to combine my hobby with my thesis so I could have the motivation to keep going when I felt tired. He also provided me with much assistance when I faced difficulty and troubles. Furthermore, I also learned a very important life lesson from him. As a young man, I used to do things based on my ways without thinking about others and communicating with others. Howard made me see my drawback when giving me advice so I could go back to the right track when I became careless and got lost in my wrong way. Because of his love and care, I would be to complete my thesis and improve my personality. I also want to thank my committee members of my thesis, Dr. Chih-Cheng Lin and Dr. Shu-Li Lai. They not only provided many insightful suggestions for me to revise my thesis but also carefully proofread my thesis to help me correct my mistakes. My family members and friends also played important roles during my thesis writing. They always raised me up and took care of me when I felt down and exhausted. To me, they are not only my safe harbor but also my cheer leader to encourage me and give me energy. Last, I would like to thank my religious mentor, Miao Zen master. He taught me how to find inner peace through daily meditation and weekly Buddhism class. With his help, I could stay calm and strike a balance between work and study. Furthermore, I got to explore the purpose of life from another point of view thanks to his enlightenment and love.. IV.

(6) Table of Contents CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................................ 1 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background and Motivation ............................................................................ 1 1.2 The Purpose of the Study ................................................................................. 3 1.3 Research Question ........................................................................................... 7 CHAPTER TWO ........................................................................................................... 8 LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................... 8 2.1 ESP Corpus ...................................................................................................... 8 2.1.1 Corpus for General English .......................................................................... 8 2.1.2 Corpus for Specific Purpose ....................................................................... 10 2.2 ESP Teaching Material ................................................................................... 12 2.2.1 Studies on ESP Word List ........................................................................... 12 2.2.2 Studies on ESP Phrase List and Collocation List ....................................... 16 2.2.3 Summary of Previous ESP Teaching Material ............................................ 17 2.3 Sports English as ESP Teaching Material ...................................................... 18 2.3.1 Impact of Sports English Teaching Material on Students ........................... 18 2.3.2 Published Books for Sports English ........................................................... 19 2.4 Basketball English as ESP Teaching Material ............................................... 21 2.4.1 Published Books for Basketball English ..................................................... 22 2.4.2 Summary of the Books Related to Basketball English and Limitation ...... 23 CHAPTER THREE ..................................................................................................... 26 METHOD .................................................................................................................... 26 3.1 Development of the Basketball English Corpus ............................................ 26 3.3 Comparing the Web Corpus with the Teaching Material ............................... 35 3.3.1 Criteria to Generate Word List and Phrase List .......................................... 36 3.3.2 Word and Phrase Lists Comparison Tool Venny 2.1 ................................... 37 3.3.3 Selection and Comparison of Collocation .................................................. 40 CHAPTER FOUR ........................................................................................................ 41 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION................................................................................... 41 4.1 Comparison and Categorization of Word List ............................................... 41 4.1.1 Word List Forming and Comparison .......................................................... 42 4.1.2 Categorization of Words ............................................................................. 42 4.2 Comparison of Phrase List ............................................................................. 61 4.2.1 Comparison of 2 Gram List ........................................................................ 61 4.2.2 Comparison of 3 Gram List ........................................................................ 66 4.2.3 Comparison of 4 Gram List ........................................................................ 70 V.

(7) 4.3 Comparison of Collocation ............................................................................ 74 4.4 Building Basketball English Word List and Phrase List ................................ 91 CHAPTER FIVE ......................................................................................................... 93 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................ 93 5.1 Summary of Major Findings .......................................................................... 93 5.2 Pedagogical Implication................................................................................. 94 5.3 Limitation and Suggestion for Future Research ............................................ 96 References .................................................................................................................... 98 Appendices ................................................................................................................. 102 Appendix A. List of 202 Seed Words Related to Basketball English ................ 102 Appendix B. Basketball English Word List (310 words in total) ...................... 103 Appendix C. Basketball English Phrase List (147 phrases in total) .................. 113. List of Tables Table 1 : Merits of the reviewed ESP teaching materials. ........................... 17 Table 2 : Merits of books teaching basketball English. ............................... 24 Table 3 : Criteria to Select Lexical Items from the Web Corpus and the Teaching Material. ............................................................................... 36 Table 4 : Number of Word Types Chosen in Word Lists Building. ............... 42 Table 5 : Basketball English Words Appearing Only in Web Corpus but not in the Teaching Material in the League Category................................ 43 Table 6 : Basketball English Words Appearing Only in Web Corpus but not in the Teaching Material in the Game Category. ................................. 46 Table 7 : Basketball English Words Appearing Only in Web Corpus but not in the Teaching Material in the People Category. ............................... 50 Table 8 : Basketball English Words Appearing Only in Web Corpus but not in the Teaching Material in the Court Category. ................................. 53 Table 9 : Basketball English Words Appearing Only in Web Corpus but not in the Teaching Material in the Movement Category. .......................... 56 Table 10 : Basketball English Words Appearing Only in Web Corpus but not in the Teaching Material in the Stat Category. .................................... 59 Table 11 : Number of Phrase Types Selected to Build Phrase List. ............. 61 Table 12 : Basketball English 2 Grams Appearing only in the Web Corpus but not in the Teaching Material. ......................................................... 62 Table 13 : Basketball English 3 Grams Appearing only in the Web Corpus but not in the Teaching Material. ......................................................... 66 Table 14 : Basketball English 4 Grams Appearing only in the Web Corpus VI.

(8) but not in the Teaching Material .......................................................... 70 Table 15 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Assist. ............... 76 Table 16 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Playoff. ............. 77 Table 17 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Draft. ............... 78 Table 18 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Possession........ 78 Table 19 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Score. ............... 79 Table 20 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Roster. .............. 80 Table 21 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Defender. .......... 81 Table 22 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Shooter. ............ 82 Table 23 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Basket. ............. 83 Table 24 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Range. .............. 83 Table 25 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Floor. ............... 84 Table 26 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Turnover. .......... 85 Table 27 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Rebound. .......... 86 Table 28 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Pass. ................. 87 Table 29 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Shot. ................. 88 Table 30 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Layup. .............. 89 Table 31 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Foul. ................. 90 Table 32 : Collocation Comparison of the Common Word Charge. ............ 91 Table 33 : An Example of the Basketball English Word List ........................ 92. VII.

(9) List of Figures Figure 1 : The home page of Sketch Engine................................................ 28 Figure 2 : The interface of getting seed words. ........................................... 28 Figure 3 : The web sites found by WebBootCat. ......................................... 29 Figure 4 : The place where user‟s corpus is built. ....................................... 30 Figure 5 : Word list tool. .............................................................................. 31 Figure 6 : N-gram tool. ................................................................................ 32 Figure 7 : Concordance tool. ....................................................................... 33 Figure 8 : File view tool. ............................................................................. 34 Figure 9 : Original web page. ...................................................................... 34 Figure 10 : Word sketch tool........................................................................ 35 Figure 11 : Interface of Venny 2.1. .............................................................. 38 Figure 12 : An example of Venny 2.1. ......................................................... 39 Figure 13 : An example of assist in web corpus by word sketch. ............... 75. VIII.

(10) CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background and Motivation As a global language, English has already received much attention from nations around the world (Crystal, 2003). Countries whose native language is not English all put lots of emphasis on the teaching of English. Take Taiwan for example, students have to learn English from elementary school education all the way to their college education. From the compulsory education, teachers focus on the teaching of general English. When students are in junior and senior high school, English courses are mainly designed to teach them the basic four skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing. The content is composed of basic general English. For example, students learn how to have daily conversation with others and how to read English articles of general genres to acquire knowledge. The vocabulary threshold in different periods of the education also differs. In junior high school, 1,200 most frequently used words are required to be taught. In senior high school, 4,000 most frequently used words are listed as the guide to develop all the high school text books and teaching materials. Even though students can learn a certain amount of vocabulary and sentence patterns, what they are taught is actually English for general usage. Under such educational condition, every student learns the same English. If they have specific needs when they want to pursue English of special knowledge, general English taught at school can‟t meet their needs. To solve this problem, learning English for specific purpose (ESP) comes to our aid. According to Anthony (2015), ESP has received more and more attention since 1960s as a result of the economy and knowledge globalization. There are also more and more journals related to ESP such as English for Specific Purpose, The Asian ESP 1.

(11) Journal and the Taiwan International ESP Journal. Because of the effect of globalization and the development of academic field, more and more people are paying attention to ESP. This phenomenon is especially obvious in Asia. Chen (2011) mentioned that workers in some international companies really need the English skills in special areas to carry out their work. In addition, students also need to equip themselves with improved and specific English skills to go for advanced study and also cooperate with scholars from other countries. Aside from the abovementioned points, the development of ESP can also be found in the increasing number of colleges which provide students with MA programs in ESP (Anthony, 1998).For example, the University of Birmingham and Aston University in the UK all offer many ESP programs for MA students. Asia countries such as Japan also began to replace some general English courses with ESP courses like English for chemists (Anthony, 1998). In sum, ESP has received more and more attention during recent decades. In terms of the definition of ESP, it is often regarded as a field where teaching English and special knowledge are combined together. For instance, ESP includes business English, technical English, medical English, legal English, etc. Take engineering English for example, it is designed for engineers who pursue professional education, engineering knowledge and practice of designing materials, structures and systems of certain buildings through English. Engineering Wordlist (Ward, 2009) serves as a well-established teaching material which can empower the target students to be capable of gaining engineering English vocabulary knowledge. Nowadays, ESP can be seen in various forms to aid English learners. For example, ESP is taught in many universities and professional association of teaching English in the world. Educators also pay much attention to the course design of ESP classes. Take the business English class in many colleges for example, it can equip the students with 2.

(12) the professional business English knowledge for them to be able to communicate with business partners when they start working in the career market. With the help of modern technology, there are also applications in smart phones combining ESP to help learners enhance their ESP proficiency in a more convenient way. For instance, Civil Aviation is an app containing all kinds of aviation English terms created by Apple company for aviation professionals like pilots who want to improve their communication in the work environment. The abovementioned contributions of ESP bring lots of benefits to people who seek knowledge of a certain field in English. In terms of sports English, there are also some published books teaching football, basketball and baseball English. Especially interested in basketball, the present study aims to evaluate a basketball English teaching material with the help of corpus and concordancer. 1.2 The Purpose of the Study National Basketball Association (NBA) was founded in 1946 in New York City, and it is also considered the best basketball league in the world. There is a large amount of audience watching NBA games, news and related reports. Famous star players such as Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant all have already existed in the memory of numerous people. Many related products such as clothes, sneakers, books and video games are also prevalent among the world. Since all the games and news are all reported and broadcast in English, proper interpretation and translation works have to be done to make information understood by people who don‟t speak English. Unavoidably, a great deal of first-hand news and rumors can‟t be fully delivered to the fans if there is no instant translation help or when the translation is not good enough. When watching the live games, fans will also have difficulty understanding what the players, the coaches, the anchors and the side line reporters talk about if they 3.

(13) don‟t know much about basketball English. Take the phrase shoot from downtown for example, many people will feel confused when they first hear the term because it actually means shoot the three point ball instead of shooting from the center of a city. Viewers whose native language is not English may have a hard time understanding the meaning of certain technical terms used in basketball English. Additionally, for people who are equipped only with basic English proficiency from compulsory education like junior high or senior high school English classes, various unique expressions in the live reports, game news and press conference accompanied by many technical terms may hinder their comprehension a lot especially when there is no interpreter on those occasions to do the instant translation work. Without fully understanding all the audio input in English, a perfect experience of enjoying NBA can never be complete. To solve this problem, a basketball English teaching material would be of great help. In fact, though there are few ESP studies which contribute to sports English, there are actually some books and teaching materials in the book markets and libraries related to the teaching of sports English. For example, there are books written to teach football English like Redmond & Warren’s Express Series English for Football: English for Football and there are also books combining NBA game news and teaching basketball English together such as Wu and Hsu‟s Fast Break. Rich as those books are, they are actually written based on the authors‟ experience and intuition, which are not objective enough. To make a robust ESP teaching material, how to develop it and what to be included in it are two very important issues to be considered. Considering the process about how to compile ESP teaching materials, most of the previous studies used corpus as their base to build their word lists and phrase lists. For instance, Coxhead (2000) established an academic English corpus to generate the Academic Word List. 4.

(14) Yang (2015) also created a nursing research article corpus to develop the Nursing Academic Word List. Martinez and Schmitt (2012) created a Phrasal Expression List based on BNC. In sum, a well-established ESP teaching material needs the strong support of a robust corpus. In terms of what to be included in the EPS teaching material, vocabulary knowledge is the main stream. In general, there are three forms, which are the word list, phrase list and collocation list. Those lists designed for specific purposes are significant not only in research but also in pedagogy. For example, The General Service List (West, 1953) has been useful when designing simple readers for ESL/EFL beginning learners while The Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) helps students to learn high frequent academic words for their study and research purpose. Ward (2009) created a Basic Engineering Word List to benefit those who are going to study engineering with low English proficiency. Aside from wordlists, Martinez and Schmitt (2012) also created a Phrasal Expression List to contribute to the teaching of multiword lexical items. In addition to ESP teaching materials of wordlist and phrase list, a further step was completed by Ackermann and Chen in 2013. In their study, they compiled an Academic Collocation List with an aim to help students to improve their collocation competence in the field of academic English. In conclusion, words, phrases and collocations all received attention in the previous ESP teaching materials. For basketball English, a robust basketball English teaching material Fast Break was published by Wu and Hsu in 2012 to aid Taiwanese basketball fans. The main purpose of the book is to help NBA fans in Taiwan to get the key to fully understanding and enjoying the game. There are some merits in the book Fast Break. In addition to words, the teaching material contains phrases and idioms since there are many kinds of formulaic expressions in basketball field and formulaic language is as important as individual words (Schmitt, 2010). Additionally, Duan & Qin (2012) also 5.

(15) pointed out the importance of collocation in English teaching and learning. In the teaching material, collocation is also included. Aside from vocabulary knowledge, Chinese translation is provided because even though lots of language teachers may not put emphasis on translation in language teaching, translation still plays an important role for learners when they learn a foreign language (e.g. Naiman etal, 1978; Marti Viano and Orquin, 1982; Politzer, 1983). To make the vocabulary knowledge more meaningful, the authors also provides example sentences because through the use of authentic materials, students will have the possibility to feel part of the reality and culture of the language they are learning (Piri & Gjinali, 2014). Given that the basketball English teaching material Fast Break has already had many rich contents, limitation still exists. That is the lack of support from a robust corpus. To develop a well-established vocabulary item list, a corpus is essential to serve as the data base, from which key words and phrases related to the specific field of knowledge can be generated. Reppen and Simpson (2002) indicated that corpus linguistics provides an extremely powerful tool for the analysis of natural language and can provide tremendous insights to see how language use varies in different situations. In terms of target words selection, frequency is an important criterion in West‟s General Service List (Howatt, 2004). With the help of web concordancer Sketch Engine, a website program that can build frequency lists, the present paper aims to develop a basketball English corpus based on the web pages. Furthermore, a word list, phrase lists and collocations will be generated from the web corpus to compare with the contents of the basketball English teaching material Fast Break. Additionally, the present study will also compile a basketball English word list and phrase list based on the current basketball English web corps and the book Fast Break. 6.

(16) 1.3 Research Question To evaluate a well-established teaching material for basketball English, the present study built a corpus composed of basketball English on the web pages. Equipped with the functions and power of Sketch Engine, the current work aims to generate a word list, phrase lists and collocations from the web corpus to compare with the lexical item lists and collocations in the basketball English teaching material Fast Break. The main goal of the current study is to examine if the web corpus can benefit the teaching material to enrich its vocabulary, phrases and collocations. In sum, there are three research questions addressed in the present study: (1) Can a web basketball English corpus contribute to enrich the vocabulary of a basketball English teaching material? (2) Can a web basketball English corpus contribute to enrich the phrases of a basketball English teaching material? (3) Can a web basketball English corpus contribute to enrich the collocations of a basketball English teaching material?. 7.

(17) CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW Previous literature has indicated that ESP teaching material can benefit learners and teachers in many ways. Equipped with the function of corpus and concordancer, words and phrases in the ESP teaching material can be generated in a more robust and objective way. Although there are ESP word lists and phrase lists in different fields like engineering and chemistry, no formal study has been conducted on sports English. In the literature review section, three areas of literature are reviewed. Section 2.1 introduces the role of ESP corpus in teaching material design. Section 2.2 displays previous ESP word lists, phrase list and collocation list. Section 2.3 presents works and materials related to the teaching of sports English. Section 2.4 reviews published books teaching basketball English. In the end of section 2.4, a brief summary and limitation of the reviewed basketball English books will be provided. 2.1 ESP Corpus In section 2.1, the present study introduces two main types of corpus. The first one is corpus for general English which contains English text from various genres. BNC and COCA are examples of corpus of general English. The second one is corpus for specific purpose. This type of corpus was built often due to a specific need such as pedagogy and research. It contains text of specific English such as academic English and engineering English. 2.1.1 Corpus for General English A corpus may contain a wide variety of texts from different kinds of sources such as novels, newspaper, research articles, etc. Take the British National Corpus for example, it is a 100-million-word text corpus composed of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. To be more specific, the corpus 8.

(18) contains British English of the late 20th century from many kinds of genres. The main merit of BNC is that it can be viewed as the representative sample of spoken and written British English of that time. Furthermore, BNC is a corpus of modern, naturally occurring language in the form of speech and written text (see Wikipedia, 2016). With the help of computer, it can be further analyzed. As a corpus readable by computers, BNC contributes to pave the way for automatic search and processing in the field of corpus linguistics. A main reason why BNC stands out from existing corpora is that it opens up the data not just for the use of academic research, but to commercial and educational uses as well. In addition to BNC, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is also a very large freely-available corpus. The context, however, is mainly from American English. According to Wikipedia (2016), COCA was created by Mark Davies, a professor of Corpus Linguistics at Brigham Young University. It is probably the general English corpus that is used most. The main strength of COCA is that it contains more than 520 million words of text and it is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. For spoken texts, it includes transcripts of unscripted conversation from nearly 150 different TV and radio programs. For fiction texts, it contains short stories, plays and movie scripts. For popular magazines, about 100 different kinds of magazines such as news, health, home and gardening, women's, financial, religion, and sports are included. In the section of newspaper, ten newspapers from across the US are all included. For academic texts, there are nearly 100 different peer-reviewed journals Rich as BNC and COCA are, they still have some limitations. For example, they include texts of general English usage. However, the range of the content is so wide that it can‟t narrow down and focus on a certain type of text such as engineering, nursing or sports English. For example, the phrase point guard, an important and very 9.

(19) frequently used phrase in basketball English, does not appear in BNC. Additionally, the word layup which is very often used in basketball English only appears for 1 time in the BNC. Therefore, a study which wants to do research on a specific area will have difficulty gaining enough rich information in a general English corpus. In terms of basketball English, there is for sure a certain amount of coverage in a general English corpus. Nevertheless, it is not rich enough. For instance, there are lots of texts existing on various web pages nowadays. Those valuable texts cannot all be included in BNC and COCA. People who want to lean more English vocabulary knowledge on such a specific genre may have difficulty reaching all the essential words and phrases of the field in a large general English corpus like BNC and COCA. Therefore, forming a user-oriented corpus for specific purpose is still necessary if there are special needs for learning English and educational research. 2.1.2 Corpus for Specific Purpose To meet the special needs of learning a certain kind of English, there are many English for specific corpora having been created. West (1953) built a corpus of 5 millions words with the needs of ESL/EFL learners in mind. In the end, he selected 2000 most widely used words from the corpus. Thanks to the corpus, a General Service List was created and it contributed a lot to ESL and EFL beginning learners. The list could benefit beginning English learners because a person who understands all of the 2,000 words on the list and their related families would make sense of approximately 90 to 95 percent of colloquial speech and 80 to 85 percent of common written texts. The list can also benefit writers who want to compile simple readers for beginning English learners. Coxhead (2000) also created a corpus of 3.5 million words. The text of Coxhead‟s corpus came only from academic resources. From the academic corpus, 10.

(20) Coxhead selected 570 word families to form the Academic Word List. The 570 words only account for 10% of the total words in academic text but only 1.4 % of the total words in a fiction collection of the same size. This difference in coverage means the list contains predominately academic words. The Academic Word List was mainly used by teachers as part of a material for learners pursuing college education. In terms of the advantages of building a user oriented corpus on English teaching and learning, there are also many studies worthy of our attention. Charles (2012) conducted a research showing us that even students who practiced academic writing could benefit from the corpus they constructed on their own. In the research, students found it easy to build their academic corpus. The size was relatively small which only contained 15 academic research articles. However, most of the students reported that even small size corpus like theirs helped their academic writing a lot. Additionally, those participants also mentioned that they like to analyze the corpus and found the corpus a valuable tool for their academic writing. Wu (2014) designed a study to look at the merit of building ESP corpus to motivate technical college students to learn English for specific purpose. First, corpus building skill was explored. Second, it aimed to find out the way to simplify ESP courses through corpus building. Third, the study also did evaluation of ESP courses. According to the study, ESP courses have been developed and offered in Taiwan‟s technical colleges for a long time. Nevertheless, a large number of students and teachers are not satisfied with the academic achievement and outcome. Despite the fact that ESP corpus building is often used for advanced English learners, the target technical college students‟ English proficiency is generally low in this study. Therefore, teaching an ESP course to those students can be full of difficulties. After implementing some tutorials on how to build ESP corpus to students and learners, the researcher found that building and making good use of a specialized corpus based on 11.

(21) learners‟ needs can benefit classroom learners a lot. Teachers can build their own corpora to help learners select target words based on their English proficiency. This way, they can manage to overcome learning difficulties when acquiring ESP vocabulary. After realizing that ESP corpus can be useful in many ways, it is suggested that ESP corpus be implemented in language teaching, learning and material design. Tough as the building of the corpus may sound, it is actually doable with the aid of modern technology. Even students can build and analyze their own corpus to help their study. For the next section, the combination of corpus and ESP lexical item list will be further discussed. 2.2 ESP Teaching Material Section 2.2 introduces different types of ESP teaching material. There are three types of ESP teaching material introduced in this section, which are word list, phrase list and collocation list. One common characteristic shared by all the reviewed ESP teaching materials is that they are built based on corpus. 2.2.1 Studies on ESP Word List Yang (2015) conducted a study which aimed to discover the most frequent nursing academic words. To accomplish the goal, he built a corpus of about one million words. The content of the corpus was composed of nursing research articles. It was called the Nursing Research Article Corpus (NRAC). After analyzing the corpus, a nursing academic word list was generated with 676 word families. As for the frequency criterion, word forms had to occur at least 33 times in the entire NRAC. The main reason was that there were only one million words in the NRAC corpus. Compared with Coxheads‟ corpus with 3,500,000 words, it has only about one third of 12.

(22) the number of words of Coxheads‟ corpus. Thus, the frequency criterion was downsized to 33 times compared to Coxheads‟ 100 times. The word list benefited many groups of people in the nursing area including graduate students, English for Nursing Purpose teachers, material designers and researchers. First of all, the nursing academic corpus could serve as a reference for material designers. When designing an ESP course, the author could also refer to the word families in the list. Second, this academic nursing word list could help EFL students who were interested in nursing to be familiar with those key vocabulary items in a more efficient way. With the help of the nursing academic word list, students who wanted to major in nursing would feel more at ease when they read and write nursing academic vocabulary. In sum, Yang‟s nursing academic word list is beneficial to the target students in many ways. In one study conducted by Wang, Liang and Ge (2008), they developed a medical academic word list based on a corpus of medical research articles (RAs). The corpus contained 1093011 running words which all came from medical research articles in Science Direct Online. At length, the study built the Medical Academic Word List (MAWAL) including 623word families, which accounted for 12.24% of the word tokens in the medical research article corpus. The coverage of the medical academic vocabulary in the RAs is so wide that it is proven that the MAWAL plays a very important role in helping learners comprehend medical academic articles. There are many ways the MAWAL can be applied to pedagogy. For example, it can be regarded as a guide for instructors when they have to prepare for medicine-related curriculum. If teachers want to design course materials for medical academic vocabulary, they can also refer to the study to get more information. Medical English learners can also benefit a lot from the MAWAL if they want to reach a certain goal in terms of the medical English vocabulary size. Valipouri & Nassaji (2013) did a corpus-based study of academic vocabulary in 13.

(23) chemistry research articles. There are two main purposes of this corpus-based study. The first one is to build an academic English chemistry word list from chemistry research articles while the second is to compare the chemical word list with the salient words in Academic Word List and General Service List. The corpus compiled in this study includes 1185 chemistry research articles (CRAC), which has about 4 million words. Four chemistry subjects (analytical, organic, inorganic, and physical/theoretical chemistry) are included in those research articles. Eventually, the study chose 1400 academic word families which frequently appeared in the corpus to form the Chemistry Academic Word List (CAWL). In terms of the comparison with AWL and GSL, the analysis indicates that 327 of the 570 word families in AWL occurred frequently in CRAC, which also accounts for 9.6% of the tokens in the chemistry corpus. In addition, there are about 390 word families found to have high degree of frequency in CRAC. Those words roughly take up 27.85% of the word families in CAWL. However, those word families are not listed in GSL and AWL. Such findings implicates that a specialized vocabulary item list in chemistry domain needs to be discussed. A basic engineering word list was built by Ward in 2009. This word list aims to help learners who are going to study engineering through English. For those students, they may have learned English from junior high school. They can understand some general English words and phrases. However, if they are going to major in engineering-related department in college, they may have a hard time understanding their text book of engineering materials since there are many technical terms which they can‟t acquire from high school English class. To solve this problem, this paper presents an original solution. After forming the engineering corpus (EC) of 250000 words, the study collected 299 words of basic engineering English into the basic engineering English word list (BEL). Teachers can teach the BEL to learners who are 14.

(24) beginning to pursue their university education in engineering. The list is actually a very easy work for learners who haven‟t acquired engineering English before. Short as BEL is, it has some advantages. For example, it is non-technical. Moreover, it covers a wide range of engineering textbooks and can provide learners with an easy pave to understanding those texts better. Liu & Han (2015) conducted a study about environmental academic word list building. This study discusses if it is necessary to create a field-specific academic word lists. In addition, it also aims to establish the criteria of compilation and the validity test for a field-specific academic word list. The three aspects mentioned above are experimented based on an environmental science corpus. The results indicate that the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) is not very useful for environmental science learners since the coverage of some word families is not wide enough and thus can‟t include certain environmental academic words. As a result, building a field-specific word list for specialized purpose is considered necessary. Furthermore, Liu and Han‟s study also establishes the first academic word list for environmental science. It is called the environmental academic word list (EAWL). The list‟s main function is to help environmental science learners to learn the key words of environmental academic English so they will understand related academic articles more easily. Hsu (2013) developed a business word list in order to help EFL business postgraduate students. The paper also described the motivation and process of building a business word list (BWL).The word list was constructed based on a corpus of 7.62 million words. The resource of the corpus came from 2,200 business research articles (RAs).There were about 20 business related subjects among those articles. In order to reach 95% lexical coverage to make sense of the academic texts, 426 of the most frequently occurring word families in the corpus were chosen at length. Those 15.

(25) words accounted for 5.66% of the tokens in the business research articles in the study. If there are students who are interested in pursuing further study on business, the business word list provides assistance for learners to have better understanding of the specialized content in academic research. In addition, teachers who teach English for business purpose can raise their students‟ awareness of the words that are commonly used in the business genre. This way, students who are not English major can have a richer language experience to serve as a stepping stone for their study. 2.2.2 Studies on ESP Phrase List and Collocation List In addition to words, Martinez and Schmitt (2012) created a phrasal expression list based on BNC to raise the attention of the teaching of multiword lexical items. Corpus research contributes to lots of beneficial findings in language teaching. One of them is formulaic language. According to Wray (2008), formulaic language is a sequence of words combined together, but it has the same function as individual word which means that formulaic language also has a fixed meaning. In the phrasal expression list, 505 phrasal expressions are included. One important merit is that the phrase list points out the importance of formulaic language and it benefits people who are interested in doing research related to formulaic language. Aside from word and phrase, Ackermann and Chen (2013) completed a further step by compiling an academic collocation list. The academic collocation list was compiled from a Pearson International Corpus of Academic English (PICAE). The corpus was about 25 million words. Eventually, the list included 2,468 most frequent and pedagogically relevant collocations which were considered to be able to benefit and help EAP teachers and students. Having the cross-disciplinary collocations which are very essential, the academic collocation list is a very useful tool for learners to improve their competence of collocation. In addition, their proficiency in academic 16.

(26) English will be enhanced with proper use of the academic collocation list. On top of that, EAP teachers can also make good use of the ACL when they are planning their lessons. 2.2.3 Summary of Previous ESP Teaching Material After reviewing some studies, it can be seen that creating ESP vocabulary teaching material is beneficial to research and pedagogy in many ways. Many of the word lists mentioned above contain words in specific field and benefit target learners a lot. There are also phrase list and collocation list raising people‟s attention to phrase teaching and collocation knowledge. As shown in Table 1, each ESP vocabulary teaching material reviewed in the second chapter has its merits. Every work has its focus. Some focus on words while others may put emphasis on phrases and collocations. No matter what their focuses are, those vocabulary items are all derived from corpus. Corpus can help the building of vocabulary items become more robust and well established because there is a large amount of concrete authentic text serving as the foundation. In the next section, the current study is going to narrow down the area of ESP to sports English. Not only research articles but also books related to sports English will be reviewed. Table 1 : Merits of the reviewed ESP teaching materials. Words. Phrases. Collocation. Corpus Based. Nursing Academic Word List. ✓. ✓. Medical Academic Word List. ✓. ✓. Chemical Academic Word List. ✓. ✓. Engineering Word List. ✓. ✓. 17.

(27) Environmental Academic Word List. ✓. ✓. Business Word List. ✓. ✓ ✓. Phrasal Expression List. ✓ ✓. Academic Collocation List. ✓. 2.3 Sports English as ESP Teaching Material In this section, the present study will address the issue of sports English as ESP teaching material. First, a study about the influence of sports English on college students was reviewed. Second, some published books for sports English were reviewed. 2.3.1 Impact of Sports English Teaching Material on Students Kai (2012) did a study to investigate the influence of sports English teaching materials on college students‟ English learning motivation. According to the author‟s observation, there is a huge difference in terms of English proficiency in National Taiwan Sport University, where non-athlete students outperform athlete students in English. The athletes in Taiwan tend to be poor at English because of many reasons. For example, they didn‟t get the sense of achievement in junior and senior high school which led to their lack of confidence in English. Therefore, they become less motivated when they have to learn English in college. Based on a questionnaire survey done in 2009, more than three-fourths of the athlete students in National Taiwan Sports University were not interested in learning English by using English textbooks with general English content. In order to solve the problem, the researcher did some changes to the materials of the textbook. Certain ESP materials like sports English and fitness-related English were included into the original textbook. Two 18.

(28) freshman classes served as the control group and experimental group in the study. The former used the original material with the standardized English text book while the latter used the revised material where ESP materials such as sports English were included. The outcome of the study revealed significant difference in the post-class test. The class using English-for-sports-purposes materials scored 9.8 points (total 100 points) higher than the class using original textbooks. Generally speaking, students in the experimental group showed much higher motivation than the students in the control group. In brief, the research suggests that sports English be applied to low-achievers‟ English classes to enhance their motivation to learn English. 2.3.2 Published Books for Sports English Published in 2013 in Taiwan, Huang‟s Sports English (運動英語) is actually a course material combining ESP and various sports together. The original purpose of this book is to help students who study in sports related department to enhance their English proficiency about sports. It can serve as a course material for one semester. Eight chapters are included in this book. Each chapter mainly talks about one sport. In brief, there are baseball, basketball, tennis, golf, cycling, triathlon, swimming and Olympics. For each sport, the author introduces the English of a certain sport equipment, rules, techniques and scoring terms. For example, the English of all parts of a bicycle are introduced in the cycling chapter and many interesting terms about scoring in tennis such as love standing for zero point are also listed in the book. It also includes some reading materials of stories about famous sportsmen like Lance Armstong. In addition, there is also an additional practice part at the end of each chapter for teachers and learners‟ reference. The practice includes a dialogue, vocabulary practice, reading comprehension and questions, basic sentence pattern practice and application. 19.

(29) Overall, this book is very rich in terms of its topic variety since many kinds of sports are included. However, it does not narrow down enough to focus on a certain sport. For one sport, the coverage is roughly about ten pages. Additionally, there are few example sentences to demonstrate how a certain vocabulary item is used. Learners can‟t have a thorough understanding of one sport English by just reading this book. In Yu‟s Go Yard with Sports English(運動英語紅不讓) published in 2008, there are many kinds of sports English discussed including baseball, basketball, boxing, football, trackfield, tennis, golf, racing and horsing. For each sport mentioned above, the book lists about 50 idioms. Instead of only providing Chinese translation, there are also detailed explanation and example sentences for readers to have better comprehension of a certain idiom. For example, the idiom trash talk means the offensive language spoken between players to get others angry. Along with the Chinese translation and the detailed explanation, one example sentence is also provided: “Our team successfully trash-talked their leading scorer into throwing a punch and getting ejected from the game.” On top of the idiom part, the book has a diction part for baseball, basketball and tennis. Take basketball for example, there are about 270 vocabulary items included. For each word or phrase, Chinese translation and explanation are included. At the end of the book, the author also selected some pieces of news as teaching materials for some phrases and words. In general, the book is rich because it includes the idioms and words of many sports. However, there is no example sentence in the diction part and the book does not teach collocation use to learners. If learners want to know how to use a certain vocabulary item, they will have a hard time using it correctly in a sentence without the instruction of collocation. 20.

(30) Redmond and Warren (2014) wrote a book named Oxford Express Series : English for Football. The author of the book is a big football fan. After compiling this book, he tried to teach football English to potential learners like football fans and football players. Furthermore, he also aimed to teach the important English vocabulary and terminology used in football field. According to the author, football has its special lexicon different from general English. Expressions like drop deep and hold the ball up are crucial terms not only for players to understand during a match but also for football fans to communicate with each other while watching and talking about the game. With the help of the book, teachers can teach football English to their students or football fans can also learn the phrasal verbs which are divided based on frequency. In addition, the book also provides and clearly illustrates the situation for a specific vocabulary item. For example, the book demonstrates that mark up is the term that people will hear from a goalkeeper when he is defending corners and free-kicks. Additionally, it also includes some exercises for students to practice in order to get familiar with those professional terms. In sum, this book is useful not only for professional footballers but also for people fond of watching football. 2.4 Basketball English as ESP Teaching Material 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. 21.

(31) 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 22.

(32) 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 23.

(33) 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. 英文烹小. phrases. example. collocation Chinese. sentence. translation. ✓. ✓. ✓. ✓. ✓. ✓. ✓. ✓. ✓. ✓. ✓. corpus based. 鮮-美國職籃 Go Yard with Sports English (運動英語紅不讓) Fast Break. ✓. ✓. (快攻 NBA 籃球英文) 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 24.

(34) 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.. 25.

(35) 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. 3.1 Development of the Basketball English Corpus Over the past ten years, corpora of language data have started to play an increasingly important role in determining how languages are taught (Coniam, 2004). In terms of the development of a robust corpus, the organization of the corpus and its size are important issues to be considered (e.g. Biber,1993; Sinclair, 1991). To organize the basketball English corpus, the present study adopted Sketch Engine to do the texts collection job. The following paragraphs will introduce how a corpus of basketball English is formed through the help of the concordancer Sketch Engine. For linguists, lexicographers, translators, students and teachers, sketch engine is a very useful tool because it can help them look for language information of more than 80 languages. Organizations related to language such as publishers, universities, translators, translation agencies and national language institutes worldwide can also take advantage of sketch engine. Equipped with multi-billion words corpora of 26.

(36) authentic text, Sketch Engine can identify the language use of what is frequent, typical and rare. Furthermore, Sketch Engine will also present the results in a format that is easy to understand. What‟s more, parts of speech and grammatical categories will also be displayed for users to look up specific word combinations or grammatical structures. To help user construct a corpus, Sketch Engine has a unique tool which will help users collect relevant texts from the web. The tool is called WebBootCaT. It can download text data from the internet. Moreover, those data are deduplicated and cleaned. To obtain high-quality text material, spam text or non-text is eliminated. The user can specify the topic area which should be covered by one of the three options mentioned below. The first one is providing some typical words defining the topic (seed words), the second one is providing a list of URLs which should be downloaded and the third one is downloading a complete website. Since basketball related web pages may come from many kinds of web sites, the present paper decided to adopt the first option, providing typical words for the WebBootCat to search for the related texts on the web pages. As shown in Figure 1, we can see WebBootCat on the left side of the home page after logging into Sketch Engine. Clicking the WebBootCat, we can see the interface below. As illustrated in Figure 2, the process is demonstrated step by step.. 27.

(37) Figure 1 : The home page of Sketch Engine.. Figure 2 : The interface of getting seed words. First, after entering the name of the corpus in the top blank, the language of the text can be chosen to decide which text are going to be collected. Thus, the present study chose English as the language of the text. Then, the current research typed words and phrases related to basketball English such as dunk and rebound into the seed words space. The criterion for choosing seed words is the degree of representativeness. For example, point guard, dunk and scorer are very representative of basketball. Equipped with those seed words, WebBootCat would go into the internet to download all the web pages containing the target seed words. As shown in 28.

(38) Figure 3, some web pages WebBootCat collected from the internet are listed. Most of them are from sports related web sites such as nba.com and espn.com.. Figure 3 : The web sites found by WebBootCat. After collecting the web pages from the internet, all the texts on the web pages were saved into the basketball English corpus. The more seed words we enter, the more related web pages WebBootCat can help us collect from the internet. As for the present study, about 73,854,000 words of text related to basketball English were collected from the web after entering 202 seed words. The present study presents the 202 seed words in Appendix A. As shown in Figure 4, a basketball English corpus was created in the end.. 29.

(39) Figure 4 : The place where user‟s corpus is built. 3.2 Analyzing the Corpus Given that a corpus is founded, however, it is virtually useless without a tool to process and display it (Anthony, 2005). As a result, this study chose the web concordancer Sketch Engine as the corpus analysis tool. Sketch Engine, a corpus manager and analysis software, was developed by Lexical Computing Limited since 2003. Its main purpose is to help people study language behavior to search large text collections based on various and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine got its name mainly due to one of the key features, word sketches. The main functions of word sketches include one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocation behavior. In the following paragraphs, main functions of Sketch Engine adopted in the present study will be introduced. 1. Word List Tool In terms of word selection, frequency plays an important role. Nation‟s book in press(2003) and West (1953) indicated that words occur more frequently are better for learners to study compared with words which occur infrequently. In Coxhead‟s 30.

(40) Academic Word List, members of a word family have to appear for 100 times in 3.5 million words. The idea of word family is the base form of a word plus its inflected forms and derived forms made from affixes. In English language, inflections include third person -s, -ed, -ing, plural -s, possessive -s, comparative -er and superlative -est. Affixes includes -able, -er, -ish, -less, -ly, -ness, -th, -y, non-, un-, -al, -ation, -ess, -ful, -ism, -ist, -ity, -ize, -ment and in-(See Wikipedia, 2016). The concept is that a base word and its inflected forms support the same core meaning, and can be considered learned words if a learner knows both the base word and the affix (Hirsh and Nation, 1992). To deal with the frequency issue, Sketch Engine‟s word list tool can generate a list of all types of words that appear in the corpus. Furthermore, those words are sorted by frequency. With the help of the word list tool, researchers can have a clear view to see all the words and its frequency in the corpus. As shown in Figure 5, an example of the word list generated by Sketch Engine is presented. Words are ranked from the most frequent one to the least. For example, the most frequent word in the present corpus is determiner the. Rank number 25, which is the word frequently used in Basketball English games and related news, is the word points.. Figure 5 : Word list tool. 2. N-Gram Tool 31.

(41) The same function of the word list can also be applied to phrases, which can also be called n-grams. The phrase more often than not is a 4-gram, as soon as is a 3-gram and take off is a 2-gram. Based on the number put in the n, the tool can generate a list of all possible combination and then sort them by frequency. The present study includes 2-gram list, 3-gram list and 4-gram list. As shown in Figure 6, a list of 3-grams is illustrated. For example, the most frequent 3 gram is one of the which is not related to basketball. However, the eleventh 3 gram from the field is a phrase used very often in basketball English.. Figure 6 : N-gram tool. 3. Concordance Tool The concordance tool can help users see all the original context where the target vocabulary items and phrases appear. As shown in Figure 7, an example of the word points in the view of concordance tool is presented. With the help of concordance tool, users of Sketch Engine can see the surrounding contexts of a certain word. From the eighth sentence “Curry collected 23 points in his final round,” it can be inferred that points in basketball often mean the score instead of certain spots. This concordance tool can help language researchers learners know more about a word‟s behavior, its 32.

(42) meaning and how it is often used in a sentence.. Figure 7 : Concordance tool. 4. Original File View Tool The original file view tool can provide the user with a chance to go deeper to see the original context. According to Hornby (1950), context is an important factor in language learning, capable of enhancing learning interest and efficiency. Lave and Wenger (1991) also suggested that knowledge needs to be presented in an authentic context that would normally involve the knowledge. As shown in Figure 8, sketch engine will generate a list of outcome after entering the phrase three pointers. Instead of only browsing the concordance, users can also click the original file link at the left side. Then, the address of the original file will appear at the bottom. After clicking it, researchers can go to the original web page to see how the phrase three pointers works in the context of NBA game news. As shown in Figure 9, users can see the original context of the basketball news more clearly after checking the original web pages.. 33.

(43) Figure 8 : File view tool.. Figure 9 : Original web page.. 34.

(44) 5. Word Sketch Tool The word sketch tool in Sketch Engine provides the users with a view to see a word‟s collocations. As shown in Figure 10, the collocation combinations of the word ball are illustrated. With the help of the word sketch tool, we can know what words could be modifiers of ball, what nouns and verbs can be modified by ball and what word can be the verbs of ball. According to the figure, there are jump ball, loose ball and ground ball in basketball English. Ball can also act as a noun modifier such as ball handler and ball movement.. Figure 10 : Word sketch tool. 3.3 Comparing the Web Corpus with the Teaching Material After introducing all the useful functions of the concordancer, the following part is going to explain how the comparison between the present corpus and the teaching material is carried out. Words, phrases and collocation are all included in the comparison process of the present study. In addition, the comparison tool for lexical 35.

(45) items Venny 2.1 will also be introduced. 3.3.1 Criteria to Generate Word List and Phrase List After building the present Basketball English Corpus, the present work also scanned the book so that the comparison work can be done on computer. After the scanning work was finished, the present study found that there were about 16,000 English words in the teaching material. For the sake of convenience and further analysis, the text of the published book Fast Break was also uploaded to Sketch Engine. Then, word list, phrase lists were generated with the help of Sketch Engine. Frequency plays an important role to determine which words and phrases will be selected. In Coxhead‟s academic English corpus, there are about 3.5 million words. He set the criterion that a word had to appear for 100 times to be worth attention. That is about 28 times per million words. Wang‟s nursing academic word list which contains about 100 million words also followed Coxhead‟s criterion when selecting the nursing academic words. In the present web basketball English corpus, there are around 70 million words. As shown in Table 3, the present study set a criteria to choose certain number of types of words and phrases from the teaching material and the web corpus to do the comparison work. Table 3 : Criteria to Select Lexical Items from the Web Corpus and the Teaching Material. Teaching Material. Web Corpus. word. all the 2,880 types. the most frequent 6,000 types. 2 gram. all the 1,576 types. the most frequent 3,000 types. 3 gram. all the 896 types. the most frequent 2,000 types. 4 gram. all the 471 types. the most frequent 1,000 types. For the teaching material, there are 16,000 tokens of words in total and 2,880 types of words. The present study selected all types of words in the book. From the web corpus, the present study selected the most frequently appearing 6,000 types of 36.

(46) words to compare with the 2,880 types of words in the book. For 2 gram, the present study selected all the 1576 types of 2 grams in the teaching material. In the web corpus, the most frequently appearing 3,000 types of 2 grams were selected. For 3 gram, the present study selected all the 896 types of 3 grams in the teaching material. In the web corpus, the most frequently appearing 2,000 types of 3 grams were selected. For 4 gram, the present study included all 471 types of 4 grams in the teaching material. In the web corpus, the most frequently appearing 1,000 types of 4 grams were selected. The current study chose more types of lexical items from the web corpus to compare with the teaching material because the total amount of words in the web corpus is much larger than the amount of words in the published book. After the word lists and phrase lists were generated, the present work utilized the item comparison tool Venny 2.1 to explore the similarity and difference between the lexical item lists of the web basketball English corpus and the basketball English teaching material. 3.3.2 Word and Phrase Lists Comparison Tool Venny 2.1 The merit of Venny2.1 is that it can provide the users with a diagram and a table to explore the difference and similarity between two lists or among up to four lists. As shown in Figure 11, the interface of Venny 2.1 is presented. On the left hand side of the figure are four columns where lists can be put in. On the right hand side of the figure, there is the diagram that can show the difference and similarity of the lists.. 37.