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 Illustrative sentencesLanguage learners benefit greatly from example sentences, since it is an opportunity to learn language from language, my big thing. For this reason, I devoted a considerable amount of my teaching, training and writing to helping students gain the maximum benefit from illustrative sentences. In the early 2000s, I attended my first Teaching and Language Corpora conference in Bertinoro, a beautiful hilltop town near Bologna, and presented my incipient formula for computationally selecting the most useful sentences from corpora to present to students. I programmed a tool that allocated the frequency of every word in a sentence and average it. Sentence length was also a criterion.  As mentioned in previous posts, the great English lexiocagrapher, Patrick Hanks was my colleague at this time and I asked him what criteria his kind used when selecting sentences to include in their dictionaries. He said there was no list. I worked on this further and came up with a list of ten criteria that I discussed with Patrick and he added one more. I gave this list to Pavel Rychlý, who was developing Sketch Engine and his team used these criteria as a basis for their GDEX algorithm, i.e. good example sentences. It is now a standard part of SkELL and Sketch Engine. My criteria are listed on this 2006 webpage. So, it’s a good thing that corpora can select illustrative sentences, but can students? And should they? In short, yes and yes. But then what? How does a learner know what they can learn from an illustrative sentence apart from it being a targeted piece of input which they might soak in, as they do from any input they are exposed to. The answer lies in knowing the properties of the target word that are necessary to shift it from active to passive use. I am a strong advocate of the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary because it even presents its definitions in full sentences. Full sentence definitions are goldmines. From the sentence defintion, you can easily extract concept checking questions (CCQs). For example, Collins: A wildcard is a symbol such as * or ? which is used in some computing commands or searches in order to represent any character or range of characters.
Collins: An aphorism is a short witty sentence which expresses a general truth or comment.
These sentences typically start with a hypernym, here symbol, which immediately limits what it is and is not. Their definitions progress with the target word’s features, functions, etc. Each of these is encapsulated in a phrase or clause in the sentence definition. They are the properties of the word. The Collins then provides example sentences in which the abstract properties are made concrete. If students know what they can learn from full sentence definitions, they can see how the meanings of words manifest in authentic sentences.  I’m writing a student workbook at the moment which will probably be called Discovering Phrasal Verbs, in which students are repeatedly tasked with finding example sentences in corpora. The book explains the importance of the semantics of the phrasal verb particles (prepositions and adverbs) and the importance of the subjects and objects of the verbs. These properties are the most important contributors to the meanings of the otherwise opaque, or at best translucent, phrasal verbs. When you search corpora for a phrasal verb, the sheer volume of data can be overwhelming. Fortunately, SkELL uses GDEX, so the 40 sentences it presents are manageable. The other tool I recommend is CorpusMate because it is very fast, it enables searches with wildcards, and the cotext is colour-coded using the same colours for parts of speech as VersaText. The wildcard searches are necessary when the phrasal verb is separable, e.g. tear .* away, keep .* .* away.  AI is another source of illustrative sentences. In ChatGPT's own words, "The sentences generated by AI are original constructs, created using the language patterns learned during training." They are by definition inauthentic sentences, which means they were not motivated by any communicative impetus, hence they lack real-world contexts. These sentences often resemble those made up by textbook authors and test creators. It is reasonable to ask if the trade-off between authentic and inauthentic example sentences in terms of learnability is worth it. Do students really benefit more from authentic than inauthentic sentences? Like all good questions in ELT, the answer starts with, it depends. My it depends revolves around what the students are tasked with. If the textbook provides made-up example sentences without any task other than perhaps read, read aloud, translate or memorise some sentences, the students will function at the bottom of Bloom's Taxonomy. Garbage in, garbage out. But if the tasks involve higher order thinking skills in which the students skim and scan multiple examples of authentic language in search of specific properties to which they have been alerted, they develop a better understanding of the properties of the target word, and ultimately a more sophisticated understanding of language per se emerges. Like all good citizen-scientists, students engaged in “extreme noticing” need systems to record their findings that will in turn deepen their conceptual grasp of the target language and prepare them to use it confidently.  It is well-known that guided discovery is not for everyone. I was a school music teacher in my 20s and one would occasionally hear, Never try to teach a pig to sing: it wastes your time and annoys the pig. This is yet another aphorism attributed to Mark Twain, but who knows? Guided discovery demands a strong rationale, clear instructions, the right tools and an understanding that the students are going to benefit from the multiple affordances of the tasks. It is important that students are made aware of the multiplicity of these learning experiences in the process of acquiring words and their properties. No reflection, no connection.  The sentence is a suitable unit of language to observe the cotext of a word, i.e., its collocations, colligations, its subjects and objects and other properties depending on the part of speech. When you see the word in multiple sentences, as concordances provide, you can discern typical properties. This process of pattern recognition is akin to first language acquisition (FLA), but in SLA, our guided discovery tasks bring it to the surface, making awareness conscious. Given the best scaffolding, students can learn a great deal from illustrative sentences.
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 One swallow does not summer make
Hoey in fact studied foreign languages so that he could experience the processes of language learning and the practical applications of linguistic and pedagogical theory. When he was observing language in context, that is by reading and listening, he would notice certain collocations but he needed proof of their typicality before he could consider them worth learning. Just because someone has combined a pair of words does not mean that this combination is a typical formulation in the language. The lexicographer, Patrick Hanks (1940–2024) felt the same: Authenticity alone is not enough. Evidence of conventionality is also needed (2013:5). Some years before these two Englishman made these pronouncements, Aristotle (384–322 BC) observed that one swallow does not a summer make. Other languages have their own version of this proverb, sometimes using quite different metaphors, but all making the same point. In order to ascertain that an observed collocation is natural, typical, characteristic or conventional, it is necessary to hunt it down, and there is no better hunting ground for linguistic features than databases containing large samples of the language, a.k.a corpora. In the second paragraph, Hoey experienced the processes … Is experience a process a typical collocation? This is the data that CorpusMate yields:  In the same paragraph, we have the following collocation candidates:
Here is some more data from CorpusMate.  In the following example, we have a wildcard which allows for one element to appear between the two words of the collocation. Even in these first 12 of the 59 results, other patterns are evident.  The process of validating your findings through multiple sources or methods is known as triangulation, and it is an essential stage in most research. When we train students to triangulate their linguistic observations, it is quite likely that they are familiar with this process from their other school subjects. This is not just a quantitative observation, i.e. this collocation occurs X times in the corpus. It is qualitative as well: the students observe other elements of the cotext, such as the use of other words and grammar structures that the collocation occurs in. They might also observe contextual features that relate to the genres and registers in which the target structure occurs. They are being trained in task-based linguistics as citizen scientists, engaging their higher order thinking skills as pattern hunters. This metacognitive training is a skill for life that will extend far beyond the life of any language course they are undertaking. Triangulation does not apply only to collocation. Any aspect of language can be explored in this way. You may have noticed the word order in the idiom: does not a summer make. Many people have run with this curious word order and exploited it creatively. It is thus a snowclone. Here are some examples from SkELL.  Respect our students' intelligence and equip them to learn language from language. ReferencesCroswaithe, P. & Baisa, V. (2024) A user-friendly corpus tool for disciplinary data-driven learning: Introducing CorpusMate International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.
Hanks, P. (2013) Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations. MIT. Hoey, M. (2000) A world beyond collocation: new perspectives on vocabulary teaching. Teaching Collocation. Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. LTP (ed. Lewis, M.)  Once you have learned how to ask questions, you have learned how to learnThe title of this post comes from Postman and Weingartner's influential book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969). This thinking can be applied to the study and teaching of any subject. In terms of language learning, it is safe to say tht once students are equipped with new linguistic concepts, they can formulate hypotheses and develop a new range of questions that can then be explored in texts. They write: Knowledge is produced in response to questions. And new knowledge results from the asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old questions. Here is the point: once you have learned how to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to [1] know. Their statement, once you have learned how to ask questions, you have learned how to learn, could be a poster in every staffroom in the world. Learning how to learn lies at the heart of the metacognitive dimension of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Producing one’s own knowledge accords with Vygotsky’s knowledge creation and it happens through the data-information-knowledge. Postman and Weingartner’s fifty year-old revolutionary little book remains remarkably relevant. In their chapter, What's worth knowing, the authors bombard us with pages of questions that teachers could well discuss with their students. The first set of questions extracted below, prompts students to consider the nature of change, which they really should ponder if they are going to be subverted! What is 'progress'? What is 'change'? What are the most obvious causes of change? What are the least apparent? What conditions are necessary in order for change to occur? What kinds of changes are going on right now? Which are important? How are they similar to or different from other changes that have occurred? The second extract deals with relationships, another leitmotif of Learning Language from Language (the name of my unfinished book from which this blog post is extracted). What are the relationships between new ideas and change? Where do new ideas come from? How come? So what? If you wanted to stop one of the changes going on now (pick one), how would you go about it? What consequences would you have to consider? The third extract relates to the fundamental importance of language. What does man's language permit him to develop as survival strategies that animals cannot develop? How might man's survival activities be different from what they are if he did not have language? What other 'languages' does man have besides those consisting of words? What functions do these 'languages' serve? Why and how do they originate? Can you invent a new one? How might you start? The final extract contains questions about questions and questioning. They are for teachers to ask themselves. Will your questions increase the learner's will as well as his capacity to learn? Will they help to give him a sense of joy in learning? Will they help to provide the learners with confidence in his ability to learn? In order to get answers, will the learner be required to make inquiries? (Ask further questions, clarify terms, make observations, classify data, etc.?) Does each question allow for alternative answers (which implies alternative modes of inquiry)? Will the process of answering the questions tend to stress the uniqueness of the learner? Would the questions produce different answers if asked at different stages of the learner's development? Will the answers help the learner to sense and understand the universals in the human condition and so enhance his ability to draw closer to other people? Processing such questions leads to ditching old modes of thinking and replacing them with new modes of thinking, the very definition of subversion.
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