A Japanese-English Parallel Corpus and CALL:A Powerful Tool for Vocabulary Learning
Kiyomi CHUJO1, Masao UTIYAMA2 , Chikako NISHIGAKI3
1Nihon University, Japan
2National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan
3Chiba University, Japan
Keywords: corpus-based learning, Japanese-English parallel corpus,

vocabulary learning, online concordancer
1

Introduction

Vocabulary building is an essential component to language learning, and new developments intechnology provide new tools for learners. Using high-speed computers, it is now possible to use
corpora in the classroom as a means to develop vocabulary and understand language structures in real
language contexts. 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 (Tono, 2003; Umesaki, 2004). The recent development ofEnglish-Japanese parallel corpus programs have exciting potential for not only eliminating this barrier,but also in facilitating inductive corpus-based language learning, i.e., data-driven learning (DDL), inways that have not been possible in the past.
To take advantage of the potential strengths in DDL, our team of associated researchers developed
and combined a newspaper-based Japanese-English parallel corpus with a TOEIC-based CALL
program to produce a set of corpus-based vocabulary learning activities for beginning level EFL
learners. This paper will present a description of this CALL-Corpus program and will provide anoverview of program development, and a case study including classroom implementation, student
responses to the program, learning outcomes from the concordance-based activities in various learning
contexts, and the optimum interface features between the corpus and the user.

2Program Development and Implementation

2.1

Corpus and concordance program

The Japanese-English News Article Alignment Data, developed by Utiyama and Isahara (2003), is
comprised of 260,000 translation pairs from the Japanese language Yomiuri Shimbun (having 6.1
million Japanese morphemes) and the English language Daily Yomiuri (having 4.9 million Englishwords), and these pairs are automatically aligned.
We chose the multilingual concordancer ParaConc, developed by Barlow in 2002, to investigate theequivalences and contrasts between two languages. ParaConc is particularly useful since it permits awide range of investigations of aligned texts between languages.
2.2

Target vocabulary for DDL

Since one of the goals of many CALL courses is to improve learners’ TOEIC scores, we designed setsof corpus-based activities to teach learners how to use a corpus to identify recurring features of various
words frequently appearing in TOEIC, and to show them how to induce generalizations from thesamples. Using 640 words from our pre-existing CALL vocabulary teaching material ‘TOEIC
Vocabulary 1, 2, and 3’ (Chujo, et al., 2003, 2004), we created 32 DDL lessons. Thirteen of theselessons were implemented in DDL classroom applications as a part of this study.1

2.3

Tasks

Since the targeted learners’ English proficiency was at the beginning level, the majority of the tasks
were fairly 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 worde.g. the English word decline and multiple Japanese equivalents geraku, genshou, suitai, teika, andochikomi(2) examining English equivalents of a Japanese worde.g. the Japanese word joshi and multiple English equivalents boss, supervisor, superior, andsubordinate(3) collecting frequently appearing citations of an English worde.g. the English concordance of measure and its expressions such as assistance measures (shientaisaku), emergency measures (oukyuu-taisaku), economic measures (keizai-seisaku), andeconomic stimulus measures (keiki-seisaku)(4) translating Japanese phrases into English
e.g. In order to translate hyakuman-yen iri-no fuutou into English, the Japanese fuutou concordanceshows the English equivalent envelope and its various recurring multi-word expressions,including “an envelope containing … yen”.
(5) examining collocation patterns
e.g. accordance appears in a collocation pattern in accordance with and the Japanese equivalents nishitagatte or ni-motoduite(6) observing recurrences and inducing generalizations
e.g. the occurrence of ‘a rule or system’ with in accordance with2.4

Participants

The 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 freshmen in Class 2. Class 3 had 20 graduate students. The students’course objective was to use the CALL listening material and vocabulary learning material to improvetheir communicative proficiency.
2.5

Classroom procedures

During a 90-minute class, the DDL activities were integrated with the CALL individualized activities
and were performed by pairs of students. In the first 15 minutes, a review test in both listening andvocabulary from the previous lesson was given, followed by a CD-ROM listening activity for 30
minutes.
Next, the easy-to-gradually-more-difficult DDL tasks described in 2.3 were done for 25 minutes.
Learners worked in pairs with a self-explanatory DDL handout consisting of about ten tasks for
exploring the usage of seven target words. Some target words were provided with several tasks. 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 reactions tousing the DDL activity in order to assist us in evaluating the transitions in learner 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 CDROM to study the 20 target words which included the seven DDL targeted words. At the end of thelesson, a CALL CD-ROM quiz was given to confirm their understanding of the vocabulary learned
that day.

2.6

Evaluation of the DDL activities

After completing all thirteen DDL lessons, students were asked to fill out a questionnaire (“FinalQuestionnaire”) using a five-point rating scale and several open-ended comment questions.

3

Results and Discussion

3.1

Was the concordancing activity useful to learners?

Sixty-two percent of students agreed that the DDL activity was useful for vocabulary learning, versus
seventeen percent of students who did not. On the whole, learners responded with a positive attitude tothe experience. This is reflected by the fact that only three students of sixty-three responded
negatively.2
This research question was further addressed by the learners’ responses to the open-ended question“How would you like to use this tool?” Eighty-eight percent of students 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 already used to using on-line search tools such asYahoo and Google as part of their daily routines, we believe that if the concordance tool wereavailable in a similar way at no cost, then learners would use it.
3.2

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 (thirty-eight percent of students’answers) was that they noticed the one-to-many relationships between the two languages.
3.3

Did learners explore the lexicogrammatical and collocation patterns in English?

Students reported they had learned new words or specific information regarding the lexical andcollocation relationships between words, as written in the students’ reflective responses (DailyEvaluations) to each lesson. These included: “We were able to find frequently used lexicalcollocations”; “We found that English word combinations produce various meanings”; “We noticed
that slightly different expressions are used to express similar meanings”; and “We thought it was aconvenient tool for finding which parts of speech come after a word.”
3.4

Was the concordancing tool easy to use?

Forty percent of students agreed and thirty-two percent disagreed with the statement “The tool waseasy to use”. Generally, students were able to manage easily with ten minutes of instruction in the firstweek. 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; and (2) students had
to do the initial setting of both languages (English and Japanese) every week before they could startconcordancing, and this was a nuisance.
Although the Paraconc concordancer used in this study was hugely beneficial for illustrating thepotential for concordancing in data-driven learning, its limitations for Japanese-English applicationsare (1) it’s expensive for classroom use; 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 (Utiyama and Isahara, 2003). We also
incorporated students’ feedback on optimal user interface features. This first version is free andavailable at http://www.kotonoba.net/~snj/cgi-bin/text-search/text-search.cgi. Because it is JapaneseEnglish-specific, it can display citations with the correct kanji. Credit for the original design and thedevelopment of Version 1 belongs to Masao Utiyama, and the development of a new search engine isunderway in cooperation with Shinji Miura of Kobe University Graduate School. Future modifications
will be made to later versions as our research continues to identify effective features.

4Conclusion

Corpus-driven language learning using a Japanese-English parallel corpus allowed learners to compare
the vocabulary and language patterns between two languages to not only acquire new vocabulary, butunderstand patterns and usage in both languages such as the one-to-many relationships between
languages and collocation patterns. One of the strengths of concordancing use was the discovery
aspect--- students are not “taught” these language patterns but find them by themselves (with guidancefrom handouts), and this kind of discovery can be both powerful and highly motivating. Corpus-based
activities have generally been very difficult for beginner level students and as such, this kind of tool
has had limited use. However, incorporating bilingual concordancing lessons with appropriate 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 the learning
effect in this study was mainly based on learners’ impressions, we were able to discern from their
feedback that this system was both meaningful and useful. Further research will explore parallelcorpus applications to grammar in a CALL environment, and the on-going development of TextSearcher©, an on-line bilingual concordancer.

Acknowledgements
This research is a part of a project funded by CIEC (Council for Improvement of Education throughComputers).

Notes
1 The 640 words and ten of these DDL lessons discussed in this section are available at no cost at
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~chujo/.
2 They complained that the activity was time-consuming, that they weren’t able to understand its
value, and that they preferred to learn words with the CALL method.

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