Chujo, Utiyama and Miura

English Corpus Studies No.13 (2006) 153-172

Using A Japanese-English Parallel Corpus
Vocabulary to Beginning-Level StudentsforTeaching

1

EnglishKiyomi Chujo, Masao Utiyama, and Shinji Miura
Abstract
Although recognized by educators as a potentially useful tool, until now corpus application
has been limited because the English concordance examples retrieved have been difficult for
beginning-level learners to understand. The recent development of Japanese-English parallel
corpus programs have exciting potential for not only eliminating this barrier, but also in
facilitating inductive corpus-based language learning in ways that have not been possible in thepast. This paper will present evidence, from an on-going research project, of the potential forusing corpus techniques with beginning-level students in an English as a foreign language
learning context. The research areas that the project investigated are the responses of thestudents to concordance-based teaching activities, the learning outcomes of concordance-basedteaching activities in various learning contexts, and the optimum features of a computerinterface between the corpus and the users.
1. Introduction
Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in corpus applications in the classroom.
While corpus use has been considered beneficial for language learning, few attempts have been
made to use corpus-based activities directly in the classroom by foreign language teachers andlearners in Japan other than students of linguistics (Tono 2003; Umesaki 2005) because of the
difficulty students have in understanding the English concordance examples retrieved (Wible etal. 2000; Aston 2001; Thomas 2002; Tono 2003; Tian and Liu 2004). An English as a Foreign
Language (EFL) learner looking at Figure 1 might easily be overwhelmed by not only the long
list of examples, but by vocabulary too advanced to be useful. The recent development ofJapanese-English parallel corpora has exciting potential for overcoming this problem and in turn,for facilitating inductive corpus-based language learning, i.e., data-driven learning (DDL), inways that have not been possible in the past. The translation in the first language enables alearner to understand the target language concordance lines as shown in Figure 2, and provides aricher context, giving the learner “a better ‘feel’ for how the target language is used” (Hunston,
2002:184), and then enabling the learner to “tak[e] on the role of linguistic researchers toformulate and test their own hypotheses about language behaviour” (Gavioli, 2001:108). In

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Figure 2, learners are provided with concentrated exposure to particular patterns of repetition
not only in English but with a Japanese translation so that they are more easily able to extract
linguistic knowledge and a cultural understanding of the use of the language.

Figure 1. Comply in a monolingual corpus

Figure 2. Comply in a parallel corpus

This paper will demonstrate that combining parallel corpora usage with CALL-based
activities can be very effective with beginning-level students in an EFL learning context. This
research project investigates the learning outcomes and student responses to concordance-basedteaching activities in various learning contexts, and explores the optimum interface features
between the corpus and the user.
2. Procedure
Our team of associated researchers developed and combined a Japanese-English Yomiuri
Shimbun parallel corpus (Utiyama and Isahara, 2003)1 with “TOEIC Vocabulary 1, 2, 3” CALL
teaching material (Chujo, 2003 and Chujo et al., 2004) to produce a set of corpus-based
activities. These are vocabulary-based rather than grammar-based because as Gaskell and Cobb
(2004:302) noted “adapting concordances for lower level learners’ grammar development is lessstraightforward than for lexical development.” The procedure of the study is outlined below.
2.1 Corpus
First, we created an appropriate corpus. The Japanese-English News Article Alignment Data,developed by Utiyama and Isahara (2003), is comprised of 150,000 translation pairs from theJapanese language Yomiuri Shimbun (having 6.1 million Japanese morphemes) and the English
language Daily Yomiuri (having 4.9 million English words), and these pairs are automaticallyaligned.
This corpus is particularly useful for improving students’ TOEIC scores. For example,
suppose that the target meaning of the word file that the teacher wants to teach is not the noun asChujo, Utiyama and Miura

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3in ‘a paper file’, or the adverbial phrase ‘single file’ but the verb ‘to sue.’ The advantage ofusing a newspaper corpus as we have done is that when looking at 100 samples provided at
random for file, 92 percent are given in the targeted or similar context in the newspaper corpus(Figure 3), compared to only a few percent from the more general-purpose language British
National Corpus (Figure 4).

Figure 3. File in the newspaper corpus

Figure 4. File in the British National Corpus

2.2 Concordance program
The second step in our procedure was to find a multilingual concordancer. We chose
ParaConc (Barlow, 2002) to investigate the equivalences and contrasts between two languages.
ParaConc is particularly useful since it permits a wide range of investigations of aligned texts
between languages. The program includes routines for highlighting potential translations,
including an automatic component called ‘hot words’ which uses frequency to provide
information about possible translations of the search word (see Figure 5). In the example, thecandidate translations for regulations such as kisei, kisoku and kanwa are displayed in a small
window. Choosing the right translations, then highlighting and sorting by use of a component
called ‘KWIC/highlight’ provides sorted translations with highlights as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 5. Candidate translation of regulations

Figure 6. Highlighted translation of regulations

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2.3 Target vocabulary for DDL
Since one of the goals of our CALL courses is to improve learners’ TOEIC scores, our next
step was to design sets of corpus-based activities to teach learners how to use a corpus to
identify recurring features of various words frequently appearing in practical communicationsuch as TOEIC, and to show them how to induce generalizations from the samples. Using 640
words from our pre-existing CALL vocabulary teaching material ‘TOEIC Vocabulary 1, 2, and3’ (Chujo, 2003; Chujo, et al., 2004), we created three sets of DDL lessons totaling 32 lessons inall (10 + 10 + 12 lessons). Thirteen of these lessons (4 + 5 + 4 lessons) were implemented as a
DDL classroom case study as a part of this study.2 Each lesson contains activities involving‘seven or eight target words,’ providing a suitable amount of DDL activities for a typical classlength of 90 minutes.
In analyzing the concordances to look for linguistic features, we needed to obtain a certain
quantity of instances in which such features recur more or less consistently. After examining theconcordances for the 640 words, the above-mentioned seven or eight target words were chosen
for each lesson because they provide adequate samples from which learners may explore therecurring between-language lexical relationship patterns, such as the equivalent of confirm withkakuninsuru, and collocation patterns such as prior to frequently followed by a gerund.
2.4 Tasks
In a previous study, Chujo, Utiyama, and Nishigaki (in press) showed that the level of thenewspaper texts is considered “Level III (difficult)” in both English and Japanese and is suitable
for advanced level learners. To date there have been no studies showing to what extent thebilingual parallel feature reduces the difficulty level in actual use. Pre-editing the concordances
for learners, given the huge size of the parallel corpus, would be a daunting if not impossible
task. Therefore we’ve tried to reduce the difficulty of the texts by controlling the difficulty oftasks, and we have taken Aston’s advice (2001:43-44) for choosing and grading appropriate
tasks. These are to choose: (1) easy tasks which require a relatively superficial interpretation of
the data; (2) tasks which lead to precise and not misleading answers; (3) simple tasks which
require one search and limited manipulation of the output in order to categorize and sortcitations; (4) tasks which yield an appropriate and manageable quantity of data to be analyzed;(5) tasks which yield few or no irrelevant citations; and (6) tasks which allow learners to help
and support each other.
The next step in our procedure was to therefore develop a way to introduce the learners tohands-on concordancing in the least intimidating manner, using the guidelines above. The tasks
are designed to move gradually from simple to more complex exploring. Since the targetedlearners’ English proficiency level was at the beginning level, the majority of the tasks wereChujo, Utiyama and Miura

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5fairly easy. These tasks were classified into six types listed from the easiest (1) to the mostdifficult (6) and are described as:(1) examining Japanese equivalents of an English word(2) examining English equivalents of a Japanese word(3) collecting frequently appearing citations of an English word(4) translating Japanese phrases into English(5) examining collocation patterns(6) observing recurrences and inducing generalizations
These are discussed in more detail below.
2.4.1 Examining Japanese equivalents of an English word
The easiest analysis for learners is to look at Japanese equivalents for an English word. Thistask is used (a) to provide an introduction to hands-on concordancing, and (b) to gradually
explore the one-to-many relationships between the two languages. In searching for Japaneseequivalents, for instance in the decline concordance, learners find this English word is translated
into multiple Japanese equivalents such as geraku, genshou, suitai, teika, and ochikomi, and in
the promote concordance, its translations are sokushinsuru, suishinsuru, zoushinsuru, andshinkousuru. In contrast, in the client concordance, the usual Japanese equivalent is kokyaku; inthe confirm concordance, it’s kakuninsuru; and in the account concordance, it’s kouza. Thesewords are used with specific meanings in this newspaper corpus. From these activities, learners
become aware of the one-to-many relationships between the two languages as well as the oneto-one relationships. Although it is beyond the scope of this present study, it would beinteresting to compare the results of this newspaper corpus with those of a general corpus suchas the British National Corpus.
2.4.2 Examining English equivalents of a Japanese word
Another easy and useful analysis for exploring the one-to-many relationships between the
two languages is to examine the English equivalents of Japanese words. If we take the Japaneseword joshi, for example, students find multiple English equivalents such as boss, supervisor,
superior, and subordinate in their corpus. In the Japanese loan word panfuretto concordance, theEnglish equivalents are pamphlet and brochure. In the Japanese kuruma concordance, majorityof the English equivalents are car and vehicle. In the Japanese kaisha concordance, most of the
English equivalents are company and firm. Since Japanese learners often tend to have adetermined predilection for precise single word-for-word translations, these activities are
effective for developing learner awareness of the one-to-many relationships.

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2.4.3 Collecting frequently appearing citations of an English word
Identifying a variety of recurring multi-word expressions is useful for learners to understandthat there are repetitive expressions in language use in two languages. This task guides themthrough the typical patterns and meanings of an English word with its Japanese translations inorder to be able to understand and use the targeted word. An example of this would be measure
as “an action that is intended to achieve or deal with something.” In the English concordance ofmeasure, there are expressions such as assistance measures (shien-taisaku), emergency
measures (oukyuu-taisaku), economic measures (keizai-seisaku), and economic stimulus
measures (keiki-seisaku). Learners understand the expressions consisting of two or more words
have the common Japanese equivalents taisaku and seisaku. They also observe that measure isused in the plural form in these examples and understand that the taisaku or seisaku are usuallyplural actions. A student-favorite corpus-based activity is to find examples of various vehicles
and Japanese equivalents such as armored vehicle (soukousha), commercial-use vehicle(shouyousha), delivery vehicle (yusousha), diesel vehicle (diizerusha), electric vehicle (denkijidousha), and four-wheel drive vehicle (yonrin-kudousha). Vehicle is a rather difficult word
rarely used in Japanese educational settings except that it frequently appears in university exams.
So this is an excellent opportunity for learners to become familiar with this essential daily life
word.
2.4.4 Translating Japanese phrases into English
The next activity requires learners to translate Japanese phrases into English by identifying
similar corresponding citations of the Japanese and by learning from the examples. Since “there
are inherent problems in translating from one language to another because of different
grammatical resources of the two languages” (Loo Siang Yen, 2002), learners may not be able
to translate the meaning accurately from one language to another even if they are provided withdictionaries and grammar books. Concordances can provide more information and clearer
distinctions by supplying ample citations. For beginning-level students, for example, translating
hyakuman-yen iri-no fuutou into English is challenging. They often use translation tools on the
web from which they get an incorrect translation such as ‘1,000,000 yen enter the envelope,’ oran ambiguous translation such as ‘envelope of 1,000,000 yen.’ In the Japanese fuutou
concordance, learners are shown the English equivalent envelope and its various recurring
multi-word expressions, including “an envelope containing … yen.” Trying to translate a phrase
and compare their hypothesis with the concordance results shows learners that language is far
too complex for simple, one-to-one translations from simple computer translation programs.
Students are able to see for themselves the limits of these kinds of translation programs and thevalue of concordancing programs.

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2.4.5 Examining collocation patterns
In looking at the concordance lines and observing the recurrences of similar forms andpatterns, we may find recurring collocation patterns. For example, in the accordanceconcordance shown in Figure 7, of all the 239 lines, accordance appeared in a collocation
pattern in accordance with and the Japanese equivalents ni-shitagai, ni-shitagatte and nimotozuite. Similar patterns are observed, e.g. due is mostly followed by the preposition to andprior to is frequently followed by a gerund or noun phrase.

Figure 7. Accordance in Japanese-English parallel corpus
2.4.6 Observing recurrences and inducing generalizations
Observing recurrences and inducing generalizations are the most advanced level task
provided in these corpus-based activities. Learners are asked to find recurring semantic
categories such as the occurrence of ‘a rule or system’ similar to the pattern they found earlier
with in accordance with. One example is approve, which recurs in the newspaper corpus as‘approve a plan’, ‘approve a bill’, ‘approve a request’, and ‘approve the proposal.’ Herestudents see that approve is mainly used in discussions of Japanese government matters.
Another good example of this type of activity is the semantic category of downtown. Japaneselearners tend to translate the meaning of downtown as shitamachi, which are the traditional
shopping, entertainment and residential districts of Tokyo such as Ueno and Asakusa, from themisinterpretation of the direct translation of each word section, i.e., down translated to shita andtown to machi. In the downtown concordance shown in Figure 8, learners find that the majorityof Japanese equivalents mean ‘the center of a town or city.’ This is an effective discovery
learning technique for correcting learners’ erroneous beliefs.
As Hunston noted, “With very advanced students, or students who have worked withconcordance lines before, this may be a successful strategy. With other students, more detailed
instructions may have to be given” (2002:174). Therefore with beginning-level learners, the task
might be divided into several stages such as (1) to list the Japanese equivalents of downtown;Chujo, Utiyama and Miura

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8(2) to list the English citations including downtown which appear more than twice, and attach
their Japanese equivalents; and (3) to find recurring semantic categories common to downtown.

Figure 8. Downtown in Japanese-English parallel corpus
3. Combining DDL with CALL
At first glance, CALL and DDL are opposites. The CALL vocabulary teaching material that
we developed focuses on the explicit learning of word lists. In contrast, the DDL, or corpusbased, vocabulary teaching which we described above involves the inductive learning of words
through the discovery of recurring patterns. CALL can teach more words than DDL, though
admittedly at a more superficial level. DDL, however, is too slow for the usual class time
available. Another difference is that CALL is individualized learning, and the DDL conducted inthis study is pair-based so that students can help and support each other.
We believe both methods are complementary and in this study we combined the strengths ofboth methods. Specifically, we explored a third of the targeted words (of twenty) through DDL
and then reviewed all twenty words with the CALL material. It was assumed that this system
was able to provide students with both an understanding of the vocabulary and the systematic
patterns that lie behind both English and Japanese words.
4. Research questions
Our research questions focus on the effectiveness of concordancing tools with beginninglevel learners, and with what affect and attitude they used these in a CALL environment:
1. Did learners become accustomed to using the parallel concordance tool?
2. Was the concordancing activity useful for learners?
3. Did learners discover the one-to-many relationships between the two languages?
4. Did learners explore the lexicogrammatical and collocation patterns in English?

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5. Was the concordancing tool easy to use and does it show information in a way that learners
can manage easily with the minimum of instruction?
5. Experiment
5.1 Participants
Our case study was conducted in three Japanese university beginning-level English CALL
courses which met for one 90-minute class per week for four or five weeks. There were 24
freshmen participants in Class 1, and 28 in Class 2. Class 3 had 20 graduate students. Each class
had one female student and the rest were male. All were engineering students. They did not feel
confident in their English proficiency, but they had sufficient computer skills to use theconcordancing programs. The students’ course objective was to use the CALL listening material
and vocabulary learning material to improve their communicative proficiency.
5.2 Classroom procedure
The 90-minute course followed the procedure shown in Table 1 and the DDL activities were
integrated with the CALL activities. A review test in both listening and vocabulary from theprevious lesson was given in the first 15 minutes, followed by a CD-ROM listening activity for
30 minutes.
Next, the easy-to-gradually-more-difficult DDL tasks described in 2.4 were done for 25
minutes. After a 10-minute DDL introduction in Week 1, learners worked in pairs with a selfexplanatory DDL handout consisting of about ten tasks for exploring the usage of seven targetwords. Some target words were provided with several tasks. The tasks were arranged from easy
to difficult. Since progress differed from class to class, 83 tasks in total from the pre-set tasks
developed for the DDL course were used during this experiment. In pairs, one student
performed the concordancing and the other wrote down the results on the handout. They
consulted with each other about how to perform the concordance and how to interpret thepatterns and tendencies in the data they found. Each pair was required to submit the handout
after filling out the answers to each task question. They also were asked to jot down their daily
reaction to performing the DDL activity in order to assist us in evaluating the transitions inlearner interest and ability. These evaluations are referred to as the “Daily Evaluations”.
As soon as they finished the DDL activities, they had 15 minutes to use the CALL vocabulary
CD-ROM to study the 20 target words which included the seven DDL targeted words. At theend of the lesson, a CALL CD-ROM quiz was given to confirm their understanding of the
vocabulary learned that day.

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Table 1. Incorporating DDL activities with CALLClassroom Procedure

Time (min.)

Activity

Review test

15

Individual

CD-ROM Listening

30

Individual

DDL activities

25

Pair Work

CD-ROM Vocabulary

15

Individual

Quiz

5

Individual

5.3 Evaluation of the DDL activities
After completing all thirteen DDL lessons (four for Classes 2 and 3, and five DDL lessons forClass 1), students were asked to fill out a questionnaire (“Final Questionnaire”) using a fivepoint rating scale. They were asked if they were able to get used to using the concordancing tooland if they had gained anything from the concordancing activities. Responses were ranked from“strongly agree” (rating 5) to “strongly disagree” (rating 1). In addition to this scale, openended comment questions were used. The Daily Evaluations, Final Questionnaire and students’remarks were originally written in Japanese and were later translated into English. In all theevaluations and in this article, the term “concordance tool” is used to include both theconcordance program and the corpus data.

6. Results and discussion
6.1 Did learners become accustomed to using the parallel concordance tool?
Since the students were generally familiar with computers, they quickly gained confidence
for doing concordance searches. To address the first research question, we had asked thelearners to jot down their responses to using the concordancing tool at the end of each DDL
session (Daily Evaluations). Typical feedback from Week 1 to Week 4 is shown in Table 2. We
can see that the learners gradually did get used to using the tool as they learned its basic
functions.
Table 2. Examples of typical remarks on concordance usage (Class 1)
SessionWeek 1

Daily evaluation remarks“It seems to take time to get accustomed to the tool.”“Sort and KWIC are convenient functions for looking for answers.”

Week 2“We got used to concordancing after the first week.”“Changing the font size made it easier to read the results.”
Week 3“Our searching speed improved. It’s fun.”“We gradually got used to the parallel concordancing tools.”
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In addition, the results of the Final Questionnaire were evaluated (see Table 3). In total, 63
students completed it. (From Class 3, we collected questionnaires from only eleven graduate
students out of twenty because nine students were preparing for and participating inconferences.) Sixty-three percent (25%+38%) of students reported they became accustomed tousing the tool and 40 percent (5%+35%) indicated it was easy to use. In addition, the percentage
of students who had difficulty with teacher instruction, handout usage, and concordance tasks
totaled 16% or less. Overall we can conclude that the learners were able to use the parallel
concordance tool.
Of course there is always room for improvement, as indicated by the 24% (19%+5%) ofstudents who reported that they were not able to fully use the tool, and 32% (22%+10%) ofstudents who disagreed that the tool was easy to use. We’ll address our modifications in sections
6.5 and 7.
Table 3. Final Questionnaire results
Statements

5strongly
agree

4
agree

Evaluation
3
2
neutraldisagree1strongly
disagree

I got used to the tool.

16
25%

63%

24
38%

8
13%

12
19%

24%

3
5%

The tool was easy to use.

3
5%

40%

22
35%

18
28%

14
22%

32%

6
10%

Teacher’s instruction was understandable. 38%

24

71%

21
33%

12
19%

6
10%

10%

0
0%

Handout was easy to use.

11
17%

49%

20
32%

22
35%

9
14%

16%

1
2%

The tasks were easy.

7
11%

46%

22
35%

26
41%

6
10%

13%

2
3%

Note: the upper number shows the number of students who responded.

6.2 Was the concordancing activity useful for learners?
To determine if the concordancing activity was useful to learners, we looked at theevaluations from the Final Questionnaire shown in Table 4. Sixty-two percent of students(24%+38%) agreed that the DDL activity was useful for vocabulary learning, versus 17%(14%+3%) who did not. On the whole, learners responded with a positive attitude to theexperience. This is reflected by the fact that only three students of 63 responded negatively inthe students’ remarks.3
In spite of the high percentage of students who believed the DDL activity was useful, only
36% (11%+25%) felt it was useful for vocabulary retention. Although some students discernedthat the process of searching for words did help them retain words longer, overall 36% is rather
low. We believe this is due to a lack of class time for learners to report their findings and share
the knowledge they acquired from the concordance activities with peers. ‘Students reporting on

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results’ (Tribble and Jones, 1997) is a necessary classroom feature for giving learners positive
feedback and to allow them to consolidate their learning outcomes. This shortcoming will be
addressed in future studies.
In evaluating if pair work was useful for concordancing, 51% of students (21%+30%)
responded positively. More specifically, they indicated that (1) pair work was effective (21%);(2) working together allows them to help each other (21%); (3) working together was fun, andthus helped them retain vocabulary (17%); (4) they could teach each other what they didn’t
understand (14%); (5) they could communicate with each other (14%); (6) they made friends(7%); and, (7) they could correct and reduce mistakes (7%). Overall we felt that pair work was auseful aspect for the DDL activities. Sixteen percent (11%+5%) of students didn’t value the pairwork, and indicated they preferred to work individually. It should be noted that theconcordancing program used requires paid licensing per user and another reason we used pairs
was to reduce the cost and stay within our budget.
This research question was further addressed by the learners’ responses to the open-ended
Final Questionnaire question “How would you like to use this tool?” Eighty-eight percent ofstudents answered that they’d like to use it like a dictionary to find ample examples, to clarify
the meaning of words, and to translate Japanese sentences into English. Since they are alreadyused to using online search tools such as Yahoo and Google as part of their daily routines, we
believe that if the concordance tool were available in a similar way at no cost, then learners
would use it.
Table 4. The evaluation for the concordancing activity

Statements

5strongly
agree

4
agree

Evaluation
3
2
neutraldisagree1strongly
disagreeIt’s useful for vocabulary learning.

15
24%

62%

24
38%

13
21%

9
14%

17%

2
3%

It’s useful for retaining vocabulary.

7
11%

36%

16
25%

15
24%

18
29%

40%

7
11%

Pair work was useful for concordancing.

13
21%

51%

19
30%

21
33%

7
11%

16%

3
5%

Note: the upper number shows the number of students who responded.

6.3

Did learners discover the one-to-many relationships between the two
languages?

We asked students the open-ended question “What did you find by using parallel corpus
concordancing?” One of the most frequent findings given by students was that they noticed the
one-to-many relationships between the two languages (see Table 5).

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Table 5. What learners found through concordance activities
What students foundNumber of respondents (%)

I found a word has many meanings (translations).

22(37.9%)The quantity of concordance results depends on words.

6(10.3%)

The concordance provided ample authentic examples.

5(8.6%)

I found this an interesting learning method.

4(6.9%)

It’s a convenient tool to find appropriate translations.

4(6.9%)

I’d like to use this all the time.

3(5.2%)

If it had sound, that’d be nice.

3(5.2%)

Other

11(19.0%)In addition to the Final Questionnaire, we had also asked learners to jot down their responses
to the concordancing activities after every DDL lesson (Daily Evaluations) so that we were able
to observe the transition of students’ responses. We can also see from these responses thatlearners attained this goal.
Table 6. Typical remarks on concordance findings (Class 1)
Week 1“We were surprised to find a large quantity of various meanings by searching only one word.”“We were able to find frequently used examples.”Week 2“One Japanese word has many English translations.”“Some words have a lot of examples and others do not.”Week 3“Looking at both examples and their meanings is useful for learning words.”“We can frequently find both a word’s meaning and part of speech along with the word.”
Week 4“We realized there are meanings we knew and others we didn’t know.”

6.4

Did learners explore the lexicogrammatical and collocation patterns inEnglish?

Students reported they had learned new words or specific information regarding the lexicaland collocation relationships between words, as written in the students’ reflective responses(Daily Evaluations) to each lesson. These included:“We were able to find frequently used lexical collocations.”“We found that English word combinations produce various meanings.”“We noticed that slightly different expressions are used to express similar meanings.”

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14“We thought it was a convenient tool for finding which parts of speech come after a word.”“We learned the word due is mostly followed by to.”“We learned that the meaning of words could be decided on in the context while carryingout the task.”
Overall, students were able to explore the collocation patterns as we had hoped, although thisprocess taught us two important things. First, learners had difficulty distinguishing the chunksof examples and their boundaries in context. This task seemed “easy” at first but we realizedthat to extract examples requires knowledge of grammatical structures such as noun phrases(NP), verb phrases (VP), and prepositional phrases (PP), which are the larger chunks into which
words are grouped. From another study we found that Japanese college students might not havesufficient knowledge to do this task (Uchibori, Chujo and Hasegawa, 2006). For example, in atask requiring a student to look for examples which include the word merchandise, the expected
answers were such as merchandise management and merchandise lines. However, somestudents answered yen of merchandise management or from them affiliates over merchandiselines. We had unconsciously expected them to find the minimal meaningful phrases that containthe target word. We learned that we must add some examples to each task in the handout forclarification. In a subsequent lesson, for example, in the case of currency, we put examples such
as Asian currency and foreign currencies. Another way to make this task more do-able is to use
easier words for tasks such as insurance. Providing Japanese equivalents to health insurance(kenkou-hoken), and medical insurance (iryou-hoken) at the beginning stage of DDL clearlyshows the parameters of what is and what is not included in the examples and helps students tounderstand what to look for.
The second issue involved grammatical collocations, and was an interesting learning
experience for us as teachers. In the first class we asked students which parts of speech or words
come after prior to. We expected the answer to be a noun or gerund, or a noun phrase. Students’answers were a, an, and the. We carefully looked at the concordance results and found that prior
to is actually followed by articles like the and an such as prior to the summit and prior to an
earthquake, and in frequency is followed by nouns such as prior to maturity, and then isfollowed by gerunds such as prior to attending the summit and prior to making such a move. In
the second class, we revised the task question to “Which verb form comes after prior to?” andwere able to obtain answers such as a gerund or –ing. We learned the importance of making
tasks very specific so that learners don’t stray too far in their searches.
6.5 Was the concordancing tool easy to use and does it show information in a
way that learners can manage easily with the minimum of instruction?
As shown in Table 3 above, 40% of students agreed (5%+35%) and 32% disagreed

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English Corpus Studies No.13 (2006) 153-17215(22%+10%) with the statement “The tool was easy to use”. Generally, students were able tomanage easily with ten minutes of instruction in Week 1. A few students forgot how to use thetool in Week 2 or Week 3 and we had to explain it to them individually again. As a reference forstudents, we developed a manual for using ParaConc with a Japanese-English parallel corpus
and posted it on our webpage as a free download.4
The general complaints from students about the concordance tool were (1) the concordancing
program was unable to produce certain kanji characters so these looked garbled (for example
some kanji characters such as 機, 繊, 法 were replaced with a character such as “@”; 5 and (2)students had to do the initial setting of both languages (English and Japanese) and fonts every
week before they could start concordancing, and this was a nuisance.6 To address these issues,
we decided to develop a Japanese-English bilingual concordancer on our own. Details aredescribed below.

7. The online bilingual concordancer
Although the Paraconc concordancer used in this study was hugely beneficial for illustrating
the potential for concordancing in data-driven learning, its limitations for Japanese-English
applications are (1) it’s expensive for classroom use with a limited budget; and (2) it cannot
handle certain kanji characters since it was not designed exclusively for the Japanese language.
To address these issues, we developed our own Japanese-English on-line bilingual concordancer,
called Text-Searcher©, using the newspaper parallel corpus. We also incorporated students’
feedback on optimal user interface features between the corpus and the user.7 This is free andavailable at http://www.kotonoba.net/~snj/cgi-bin/text-search/text-search.cgi.8 Figure 9 shows ascreenshot of Text-Searcher© concordancing the term take care of.

Figure 9. Take care of in the Text-Searcher©

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We are currently implementing various features including (1) highlighting accurate word andphrase level translations, (2) displaying the citations in KWIC format (showing the query in thecenter of the citations), (3) sorting the citations according to its text difficulty levels based on
our study (Chujo, Utiyama and Nishigaki, in press), and (4) other features useful for vocabulary
learning and ELT. Future modifications will be made to later versions as our research continues
to identify effective features.
8. Conclusion
Vocabulary building is an essential component to language learning, and new developments
in technology provide new tools for learners. Using high-speed computers, it is now possible touse corpora in the classroom as a means to develop vocabulary and understand language
structures in real language contexts. In this study, corpus-driven language learning using
Japanese-English parallel corpus allowed learners to compare the vocabulary and language
patterns between two languages to not only acquire new vocabulary, but understand patterns andusage in both languages such as the one-to-many relationships between-languages andcollocation patterns. One of the strengths of concordancing use was the discovery aspect―
students are not “taught” these language patterns but find them themselves (with guidance fromhandouts), and this kind of discovery can be both powerful and highly motivating. Corpus-based
activities have generally been very difficult for beginning-level students and as such, this kindof tool has had limited use. However, incorporating bilingual concordancing lessons withappropriate CALL vocabulary teaching material provides a successful learning tool for these
EFL students.
The activities seemed to be well received by students and although the evaluation of thelearning effect in this study was mainly based on learners’ impressions, we were able to discernfrom their feedback that this system was both meaningful and useful. Further research will
explore parallel-corpus applications to grammar in a CALL environment, and the on-goingdevelopment of Text-Searcher©, our online bilingual concordancer.
In a nutshell, we would like to point out the importance of focusing on reference skills in thelearning process in a college context. In this IT age, students need reference skills to obtainnecessary information about foreign languages even after finishing their coursework. Eightyeight percent of the learners in this study reported that they’d like to use a bilingual
concordancing tool as easily and as often as a dictionary, so our long-term objective is to create
an effective, accessible tool for an autonomous learning environment.

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Notes
* Part of this study is based on a presentation given at the 25th JAECS Conference, April 23rd,
2005, in Kyoto, Japan, and the Fifth Foreign Language Education and Technology (FLEAT)
Conference, August 10th, 2005, in Provo, Utah, USA.
1. http://www2.nict.go.jp/ jt/a132/members/mutiyama/jea/index-ja.html
2. The 640 words and ten of these DDL lessons discussed in this section are available at
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~chujo/.
3. They complained that the activity was time-consuming, that they weren’t able to understandits value, and that they preferred to learn words with the CALL method.
4. As Anthony (2004:7) pointed out, “Strangely, few of these [concordance] programs have been
designed specifically for learners in a classroom context. Rather, they have tended to be
aimed at researchers.” There are several barriers such as overly complex user interfaces
which need to be addressed for successful classroom use. A concise manual in Japanese forusing ParaConc is available at http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~chujo/
5. After consulting with Michael Barlow, we found a solution to this problem by simply deleting“@” from the initial setting in ‘search options’. For more details, please refer to our manual
listed in Note 4.
6. Most of these initial settings are retained in each computer, however the setting changes arereset to its default every day in usual school computer rooms. This is why students had to do
initial settings each class time. Recently we found a solution to this problem.
7. The students’ requests for improvement on interface were as follows: 1) to display citations
with the correct kanji; 2) to display menus in Japanese, not in English; 3) to make its
operations easier and simpler; 4) to retain its initial settings on languages, fonts, and others;5) to work SORT function properly (sometimes SORT doesn’t work); 6) to design thegraphical user interface into a more familiar one; and, 7) to search terms faster.
8. Text-searcher© was released for public use in December 2004. A growing number of people
use it to search various words and phrases. The numbers of distinct hosts that accessed Textsearcher© from 1 January 2005 to 22 September 2005 increased from 32 to 463 per month.
The number of distinct words or phrases searched by users increased from 216 (January2005) to 3,826 (September 2005). A steady increase of those numbers indicates that users use
Text-searcher© for their daily activities. We might conclude that Text-searcher© is useful forsearching bilingual corpora.
Acknowledgements
Part of this study is funded by a Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research (No.17520401) from theJapan Society for the Promotion of Science and Ministry of Education, Science, Sports andChujo, Utiyama and Miura

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Culture. It is also partly supported by the Council for Improvement of Education throughComputers (CIEC) Project.
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(Nihon University: chujo@cit.nihon-u.ac.jp)(National Institute of Information and Communications Technology: mutiyama@nict.go.jp)(Kobe University: snj@users.sourceforge.jp)