NGSL Video Concordance Learning Tool
At the New General Service List (NGSL) Project, we have spent more than 10 years developing a growing collection of the world’s most efficient vocabulary lists for second language learners of English. Each is corpus-derived, each offers the highest coverage in the world for that genre and each is open-source and free.
But in addition to being linguists, we are also classroom teachers and have spent as much time on creating free online teaching/learning resources for our wordlists as we have on creating the wordlists themselves. One such resource, the topic of this blog post, is our video concordancing tool which utilizes our NGSL Learning Dictionary and the free YouGlish video resource.
Vocabulary acquisition research tells us that learning new words does not happen quickly or easily and requires among other things, multiple exposures to the word, as well as seeing how the word is used in authentic contexts. While our various flashcard apps and online tools are an extremely efficient way to give learners multiple exposures to several aspects of word knowledge, they all lack the ability to give exposure to how the words are used in authentic contexts.
Traditional concordancers of written English have been used for decades by corpus linguists as a way to display on a single page (or screen) how a key vocabulary word is used across dozens of authentic written contexts. Proponents of DDL (Data Driven Learning) argue that this is a powerful way to help students to quickly develop knowledge of how new words are used in the real world. The problem is that because it is text-driven and text-dense, students often do not respond to written concordance activities as positively as teachers hope.
A promising new application of this DDL approach is to utilize video corpora to do largely the same thing. If the video corpus is tagged, then a search for a key word would instantly pull up the hundreds of examples of the key word being used. This is precisely what YouGlish does. Although designed and promoted as a resource for improving pronunciation, we believe it is equally powerful as a way of showing students how the key word is used in the real world, in multiple and varied contexts. YouGlish is very easy to use, giving many options for how you view the videos. Being video rather than text-based, it also has the additional benefit of being more interesting and motivating for ESL and EFL students, making it more likely that they will reap the benefits of a DDL approach to vocabulary learning.
The way we have set this up for the New General Service List (NGSL) Project is to add a direct link in our Learning Dictionary to Youglish for every word in our database. Click on any word in our New General Service List (general English), New Academic Word List (academic English) or TOEIC Service List (TOEIC English) and a new video player instantly opens up with countless examples of that word being used in authentic context. For example, for the TOEIC word “absorb” shown in the cover photo for this blog post, you can see that YouGlish has 8399 examples of the word “absorb” being used in context. You can watch as much or as little of each video as you like, but we prefer to show a single sentence with the key word then push the fast forward button to get the next video with “absorb” in it. In this way, you can show students 10-15 authentic examples of “absorb” in little more than a minute.
This resource is also a great, naturalistic way to help students develop collocational knowledge of new words. By watching dozens of authentic clips in a row for the words they are studying, they quickly begin to develop a sense of the patterns surrounding that word, seeing which other words are often used together with it.
There are of course many other potential ways to use this tool, but we felt that providing direct links to YouGlish for all the words in the New General Service List Project wordlists would be a good first step to helping students and teachers to better utilize this great free resource in a pedagogically sound way. Please let us know what you think of this resource and how you are using it. Enjoy!