Barlow’s corpora analysis as an ESAP

reading comprehension strategy

Análisis de corpus de Barlow como una

estrategia de comprensión de lectura de ESAP

Recibido: 18 julio de 2017 | Revisado: 29 setiembre de 2017 | Aceptado: 15 octubre de 2017

Yrma Doris García Rojas1

1 Universidad Católica Sedes

Sapientiae, Lima - Perú

E-mail: yrma.garcia.r@upch.pe

Ab s t r ac t

The purpose of the present article is to demonstrate that

the adaptation of Barlow’s corpora analysis can prove to

be effective for developing reading comprehension skills

in an English for Specific and Academic Purpos-es

(ESAP) course for a group of non-English speaking

nurses in a postgraduate program at a Peruvian univer-

sity. The strategy is based not only on the linguistic con-

text analysis but on the integration of other procedures

associated with learners’ previous knowledge as that of

schemata, also known as background knowledge, which

can be referred to as knowledge they possess from their

nursing specialty. The results demonstrate that learners

could productively cope with unknown vocabulary in a

medical-based reading comprehension text.

Key words: Barlow’s corpora analysis, reading

com-prehension, ESAP, context, schemata,

specialized vocab-ulary

Re s u m e n

El objetivo del presente artículo es demostrar que la

adaptación del análisis de corpus de Barlow puede ser

efectiva para desarrollar habilidades de comprensión

lectora en un curso de inglés para fines específicos y

académicos (ESAP) para un grupo de enfermeras que no

habla inglés en un programa de posgrado en una univer-

sidad peruana. La estrategia se basa no solo en el análisis

del contexto lingüístico, sino en la integración de otros

procedimientos asociados con el conocimiento previo de

los alumnos como el de los esquemas, también con-ocido

como conocimiento de fondo, que puede denom-inarse

conocimiento que poseen de su especialidad de

enfermería. Los resultados demuestran que los alumnos

pueden lidiar productivamente con el vocabulario de-

sconocido en un texto de comprensión de lectura basado

en la medicina.

Palabras clave: análisis de corpus de Barlow,

com-prensión de lectura, ESAP, contexto,

esquemas, vocabu-lario especializado

http:// dx.doi.org/10.24039/cv201752215

| Cátedra Villarreal | Lima, perú | V. 5 | N. 2 | 219-234 | julio-diciembre | 2017 | issn 2310-4767

219

Yrma Doris García Rojas

Introduction

English reading comprehension has be-

come a vital communication skill to all pro-

fessionals in the nowadays-globalized world

characterized as being a knowledge society

undergoing the effect of Information and

Communication Technology (ICT) develop-

ment. On the other hand, the importance of

English reading comprehension in the life

of professionals is perceived through the

fact that the most updated and prolific

science and technology advances come

from English speaking countries via internet

rather than other means of communication.

On the other hand, it is claimed that special-

ized language should be simple and transparent for

the purpose of clarity and objectivity; never-

theless, this is not the case for many languages.

For non-English-speaking health care profes-

sionals, for example, English medical terminol-

ogy it does represent a major challenge. Even

though some specialists state that medical En-glish

syntax, for example, can be easily managed if

some instructional guidance supports the learning

process, English vocabulary in reading

comprehension needs a great deal of skill train-ing

for learners of English as a foreign language.

In order to cope with specialized language,

English program courses have been designed

falling these within English Language Teach-

ing nomenclature as English for Specific Pur-

poses (ESP), English for Academic Purposes

(EAP) and English for Specific and Academ-

ic Purposes (ESAP). In the current research,

the attention will be devoted to the treatment

of specialized English vocabulary in an ESAP

course with the help of a pedagogical strategy

that has been adapted from Barlow’s corpora

analysis approach.

As part of the current research, we will give

account of some background features asso-

ciated with English development for specific

and academic purposes. Afterwards, the the-

oretical framework that gives support to this

research paper will be provided. We make

coverage on reading comprehension approach

based on schemata-based theory. Saville-

Troi-ke regards vocabulary or lexicon as the

most important language aspect L2 learners

should develop, being this for academic or

interper-sonal competence. Takač strongly

regards that vocabulary learning should

happen in a con-scious and controlled way for

which explicit strategies should be provided.

In order to manage unknown words in an

ESAP reading comprehension course, some

procedures need to be undertaken. Corpus

linguistics approach in lexical analysis has

currently become a wide spread method in

computer-based linguistic investigation. Bar-

low´s Corpora Analysis (Hunston, 2002, p. 35)

is a proposal based on a qualitative analysis of

computer data regarding the closest words to a

target word. For the purpose of this research, we

have turned this model into an ESAP read-ing

comprehension strategy with positive re-sults.

For this, we present the research proce-dure; the

findings and results are developed with the help

of some statistics. We proceed with some

discussion, and then generate some conclusions

and recommendations for ELT professionals

involved in ESAP courses.

Background features

It is widely accepted that English is the lan-

guage of the contemporary globalized world. It

has become the means of communication for a

wide range of human life activities such as

economy, politics, culture, education, sci-ence

and technology. Hence, English language

learning has been incorporated in the educa-

tional system at the tertiary level with vari-able

degrees. In some cases, there is a great demand

of proficiency in the four skills, that is to say,

learners should prove their listening, speaking,

reading and writing skills; while in others, it is

compulsory to domain some spe-cific skills

depending on its utility. The goals and purposes

for learning English may vary widely from

country to country, from society to society, from

community to community, from institution to

institution.

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Barlow’s corpora analysis as an ESAP reading comprehension strategy

After needs analysis has been worked out to

match English learners’ needs by curriculum

designers, some differentiated perspectives deal-

ing with the lingua franca at the academic and

professional levels have come up. Currently, it is

commonly heard of programs such as English for

Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Academic

Purposes (EAP), and a third one that deals with

both, English for Specific and Academic Purpos-es

(ESAP). The development of these programs are

run by educational institutions with the hope that

“ELT professionals can contribute to the

development of a nation by training its citizens in

the academic and professional English that people

need in order to acquire knowledge and generate

improvements” (Orr, 2013, p. 2).

Saville-Troike has found that English commu-

nicative competence is associated with the knowl-

edge needed for its use. She acknowledges that

“L1 competence ideally involves the broad rep-

ertoire of knowledge which people need to com-

municate appropriately for many purposes within

their native language community” (2012, p. 135).

In other words, mother tongue knowledge fulfills a

range of communicative purposes that emerge in

authentic and spontaneous daily life situations. If

this is so, what is then the role of a second or a

foreign language in a speech community?

With the unavoidably events of techno-

logical, scientific and medical advances, the

necessity for acquiring or learning (according

to Krashen’s hypotheses, but the terms will be

used interchangeably here) an additional

language is critical. Since cutting-edge chang-

es and innovations come mostly from En-

glish-speaking countries, English has become

the additional language for a great number of

speakers all over the world while for others it

represents a second language. Some clari-

fication needs to be made in this respect. For

Saville-Troike (2012, p.2), “Second Language

Acquisition (SLA) refers to both the study of

individuals and groups who are learning a lan-

guage subsequent to their mother tongue. The

additional language is called a second

language (L2), even though it may actually be

the third, fourth, or tenth to be acquired”.

On the other hand, the additional language

may be acquired/learned in informal or formal

settings; that is, either in natural places where

the language is the main source of communi-

cation or in instructional places such as class-

rooms with the help of an expert’s guidance.

“L2 competence is typically, perhaps unavoid-

ably, much more restricted, especially when

SLA takes place in a foreign language setting”

(p. 135). This is the case for Peru where En-

glish is learned as a foreign language.

Regarding the purposes for which a second

language is learned, there are “…between at

least two fundamental types of communica-

tive competence: academic competence and

interpersonal competence. Academic com-

petence would include the knowledge needed

by learners who want to use the L2 primari-ly

to learn about other subjects or as a tool in

scholarly research, or a medium in a specific

professional or occupational field” (pp. 135-

136). This also means that learners will con-

centrate in the learning of the specific vocabu-

lary of the field and on developing knowledge

that will enable them to read in a specific sub-

ject matter with acceptable fluency. This does

not necessarily mean that the other skills are

not at all relevant for the learner. The impor-

tance of the other skills will depend on the pri-

orities for which language should be used in

the particular community context: either for

academic purpose or professional purposes or

both. On the other hand, interpersonal com-

petence embodies other communicative pur-

poses that are by far adequate for face-to-face

familiar and friendship encounters. For the

subject matter of the current paper, “Develop-

ing L2 academic reading, listening, and writ-

ing proficiency, however, does not necessarily

require fluent speaking ability, particularly for

learners studying the L2 in a foreign language

context” (p. 136).

Through the table below, Saville-Troike

shows us how the importance of activities in

which the speaker will be involved depends

on the priorities that fall into “academic

versus interpersonal needs…” (p. 136).

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Yrma Doris García Rojas

Table 1

The priorities of language skills according to the communicative competence to be

fulfilled: academic versus interpersonal.

Priorities for L2 activities

Academic competence

Interpersonal competence

Reading

1.Listening

Listening

2.Speaking

Writing

3.Reading

Speaking

4.Writing

The table suggests that for foreign lan-

guage learners, reading has become the skill

of higher priority if academic competence is

the goal, followed by listening, writing and

finally, speaking. This idea is coherent with

what Orr (p. 2) points out when referring to

some data from an American survey that in-

volved 4,057 working engineers. From 38

es-sential skills, 8 were chosen as necessary

for success in engineering communication

being speed reading one of them. In Peru,

university students need academic and

scientific infor-mation and knowledge

generally produced in English-speaking

countries if they should be kept updated.

Conceptual Framework

Reading comprehension

In the contemporary English Language

Teaching (ELT) world, reading is no longer

regarded a passive activity as it was before.

Even though “Reading along with listening, is

sometimes viewed as a passive skill… Both

involve processing ideas generated by others

that are transmitted through language. Both

involve highly complex cognitive processing

operations” (Nunan, 1999, p. 249). It is sug-

gested that reading should be carried out with

a purpose in mind and for the sake of it En-

glish language teachers be trained in the

appli-cation of varied reading skill strategies.

“Research conducted over the last decade

has persuaded most reading educators that

reading comprehension can be taught, ei-

ther by setting up learning conditions in the

classroom so that growth in comprehension is

enhanced or by teaching strategies for cop-ing

with text directly and explicitly” (Pearson, 1991,

p. 2). Through years, varied models have been

developed to cope with second language reading

comprehension problems. According to Pearson,

researchers and educators have understood

reading in general and compre-hension process

in particular. One more clear fact is that reading

comprehension is no lon-ger seen as a series of

discrete skills that can be summed to achieve

comprehension ability. On the contrary, reading

comprehension is un-derstood as a complex

process in which inter-action between readers

and texts takes place in various contexts and for

various purposes (e.g., Lipson &Wixson, 1986)

(p. 3).

n contrast to traditional reading models, the

schema-theoretical view is an approach that

relies on the learner’s previous knowl-edge of

the world. Adam and Bruce (1982:37), cited by

Meurer (1985), claim that schemata also known

as background knowledge, is the mechanism in

which the reader connects pri-or knowledge

with new knowledge in order to understand a

complex object like a text. This knowledge is

activated in the readers’ mind in interaction

with the text. “Readers build meaning by

engaging in a series of recursive interactions”

(Pearson, 1991, p. 4).

This model, furthermore, suggests that the

meaning conveyed to the text by the reader

will not resemble the meaning developed by

the author, and similarly, nor two readers of

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Barlow’s corpora analysis as an ESAP reading comprehension strategy

the same text will develop the same meaning.

Pearson adds “Each of us prints a unique per-

sonal stamp on every act of reading we create”

(p.4). From expert readers, researchers could

know what strategies they apply and what

strategies novice readers need to learn.

Saville-Troike cites Grabe (1991, p. 155) to

give account of “research on fluent academ-ic

reading in terms of six component abili-ties and

types of knowledge that are involved in the

activity”. We will mention only two of them in

alignment with the aims of this paper.

(1) Vocabulary and structural

knowledge. Recognition of a great

number of words.

(2) Metacognitive knowledge and compre-

hension monitoring. Having knowl-

edge about knowledge of language and

the use of appropriate strategies that

will ease text understanding and

information processing.

The focus in the current research is devot-

ed to demonstrate how learners’ awareness of

mental mechanisms to grasp lexical items can

facilitate reading comprehension in the target

language (English). This study embodies the

use of a teaching vocabulary strategy which

eventually, after explicit training, becomes a

learning vocabulary strategy for reading.

Vocabulary

Saville-Troike states that vocabulary or

lexicon is the most important language

level L2 learners should develop, being

this for ac-ademic or interpersonal

competence, or even for both.

Vocabulary will still be the largest single

element in tackling a new language for

the learner and it would be irresponsi-ble

to suggest that it will take care-of it-self

in some ideal world where language

teaching and learning are discourse

driven… the challenge is to bring the

discourse dimension into vocabulary

teaching alongside traditional and re-

cent, more communicative

approaches. (McCarthy, 1991, p. 64)

Another important issue McCarthy (1991, p.

64) suggests when dealing with vocabulary in

reading comprehension is context. “Most are

already in agreement that vocabulary should,

wherever possible, be taught in context, but

context is a rather catch-all term and what we

need to do at this point is to look at some of the

specific relationship between vocabulary choice,

context (in the sense of the situation in which the

discourse is produced) and co-text (the actual

text surrounding any given lexical item)”. In

other words, the distinction for the two different

views should be understood as the non-verbal

environment context in which a word is used

(which is meant to be external to the text) as in

the first case, and its linguistic environment

(which is meant to be internal to the text), as in

the second case.

Takač’s position with respect to English

vocabulary teaching aided with conventional

practices is that “The naturalistic approach to

language teaching, for example, favored

implicit incidental vocabulary learning. The

emphasis was on guessing the meaning from

context and using monolingual dictionaries,

whereas defining and translating lexical items

were to be avoided” (2008, p. 18). A shift in

the way of conducting teaching of the target

language lexical dimension is called upon as a

hint to obtain much better results. “It has

become apparent…, to all subjects involved in

the processes of language teaching and learn-

ing, that vocabulary acquisition cannot rely on

implicit incidental learning but needs to be

controlled” (Takač, 2008, p. 18). Fortunate-ly,

there are more advocates who agree that

teachers should apply more explicit strategies

on vocabulary teaching. “In vocabulary teach-

ing, teachers can apply a host of strategies and

activities. According to Hatch and Brown

(2000: 401), teaching strategies refer to ev-

erything teachers do or should do in order to

help their learners learn” (p. 19).

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Yrma Doris García Rojas

Takač (pp. 20-21) offers language

teaching professionals some ways of

presenting lexical items to learners:

 Connecting an L2 item with its

equiv-alent in L1.

 Defining the meaning



 Presentation through context



 Directly connecting the meaning

to real objects or phenomena.

 Active involvement of learners in

pre-sentation.

It is agreed by current ELT scholars that

learners’ active involvement is paramount if

they have to become autonomous; hence, in-

dependent learning is nowadays one of the

educational programs goals. In order to get

learners take ownership of their own learning

accomplishments, assimilation of explicit lan-

guage learning mechanisms needs to be en-

sured as part of lesson development.

Lawson and Hogben explain that in gen-

erating meaning of new words by relying on

context is just interpreting the sentence or the

passage coherently with no deliberate analysis

of the features of the word. “By way of con-

trast, acquisition of meaning through analysis

of surrounding contextual cues would involve

deliberate use of some such procedures…” (p.

105). We round off this section by agreeing

with Lawson and Hogben’s idea which is de-

veloped by other contemporary theorists un-

der the same conception.

Phrasal verbs

Despite their frequency in spoken and writ-

ten language, phrasal verbs are often perceived

as ‘difficult’ by both English as a Foreign/Sec-

ond language (EFL/ESL) teachers, and their

learners. There appear to be a number of rea-

sons for this. Much of the language that we use

cannot be interpreted simply by looking at the

individual words (Moon, 1997). Phras-al verbs

as multi-words are no exception and many are

opaque, making them difficult to in-terpret and

understand. They often consist of a high

frequency, monosyllabic, delexicalised

verb (e.g. get, give, go, make, take) and one of a

mixed number of particles (e.g. down, in, off,

on, out, over, up), and the problem for learners

is that these frequent and apparently simple

components may come together to form units

which are specialized, emotive, and idiomatic as

these examples: the situation is really get-ting

her down; I can’t make out what this says;

don`t give up now; it was too much to take in.

The need to cover this issue is relevant to the

current study whose text includes some phras-al

verbs that usually cause troubles to learners of

English as a foreign language, especially for

Spanish-speaking learners as the current case.

The widespread use of phrasal verbs in au-

thentic English texts calls for the necessity to

get learners is prepared to understand their

complexity at the level of semantic, syntactic,

and pragmatic aspects. Making our learners be

aware of their holistic composition as one

word and looking for other words around

them in context will facilitate reading compre-

hension.

Corpus linguistics approach in lexical

anal-ysis

“Over the years, educators have proposed a

variety of active learning pedagogical ap-

proaches that focus on encouraging students to

discover for themselves the principles and

solutions that will engage them in learning and

enhance their educational outcomes” (Huang,

2008, p. 20). One of the goals new ed-ucation

pursues is to get autonomous learners who can

manage their own learning success-fully with

little or less instructional approach each time.

With careful guidance, we can help learners

know some strategies that can ease learning by

researching, discovering, and re-flecting on the

grammatical aspect of English.

In recent years, the teaching of vocabu-

lary has assumed its rightful place as a

fundamentally important aspect of lan-

guage development. This is partly due to

the influence of comprehension-based

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Barlow’s corpora analysis as an ESAP reading comprehension strategy

approaches to language development,

partly due to the research efforts of influ-

ential applied linguists (see for example,

Carter and McCarthy (1988), and partly

due to the exciting possibilities opened

up by the development of comput-er-

based language corpora (Sinclair and

Renouf 1988). (Nunan, 1999, p. 103).

What is corpora (Latin word whose singu-

lar is corpus)? It is “…a collection of naturally

occurring examples of language, consisting of

anything from a few sentences to a set of writ-

ten texts or tape recordings, which have been

collected for linguistic study” (Hunston, 2002,

p. 2). Some pages ahead, the author cites Scott

(2000) to make a distinction between a corpus

as a collection of texts and a corpus as a collec-

tion of samples of language.

Lately, incredible advances in comput-er

technology have been of great influence in

language teaching and learning develop-ment.

This fact calls for the former definition of

corpus to be broader. Hence, a corpus is a

collection of electronic texts usually stored on

a computer and which is available for quan-

titative and qualitative analysis (Keeffee et al.

2010). Among its uses, it is claimed that, a

corpus has been very helpful to know how

language works, compare languages, estab-

lish norms of frequency, study cultural atti-

tudes expressed through language and facili-

tate language teaching and learning. With the

use of digital corpora, the term concordancing

emerged. Concordancing programs allow re-

searchers to explore the context in which par-

ticular words and phrases occur, and the other

words with which they occur (Nunan, 1999).

Barlow´s Corpora Analysis

Barlow’s proposal (1996) is based on the

analysis of corpora in a qualitative way; fur-

thermore, the linguist is concerned with only the

immediate environment of each word rather

than with the discourse in which it occurs

(Hunston, 2002). The linguist exam-ines each

word separately and analyses it in its

immediate context, that is, the target word is

analyzed in relation to words around it. “Bar-

low’s work is a typical example of its kind. He

begins with a word… and examines its imme-

diate context, comparing what is found with

what intuition or grammatical theory would

predict” (Hunston, 2002, p. 35). Although, in

Barlow´s examination, the role of the word in

the discourse is not commented on, the ana-

lytical procedure presents good points to be

taken into account as a strategy for vocabulary

interpretation in reading comprehension for

ESAP university programs. The purpose of this

paper is to prove how the adaptation of

Barlow’s approach could result in understand-

ing texts lexical items with positive outcomes.

Method

Participants – Context and population

The research involves a group of 36 Span-

ish-speaking Peruvian registered nurses (RN)

whose ages range between 30 to 50 years old.

They were enrolled in a postgraduate nursing

specialization program (nephrology, pediatrics,

neonatology, emergency and so forth). The

specialties curriculum contemplated a single 34-

hour English course on a mandatory basis.

The educational background of most of the

postgraduate nurses is associated to Peruvian

state run educational institutions where En-glish

used not to be a priority in the curric-ulum. That

is to say, at primary level, English was not a

component of the curriculum; at the secondary

level, only a two-hour period (80 to 90 minutes)

per week was devoted to English; at the tertiary

level, English was not a compul-sory course as

it was at high school; the course depended more

on institutional decisions.

An informal survey carried out the first day

of class was useful to identify the students’

English knowledge. Our main concern was to

set up the course having in mind learners’

level and needs. Nevertheless, after some En-

glish course lessons had been undertaken, the

need for tackling the problem of vocabulary

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Yrma Doris García Rojas

in ESAP reading comprehension arouses. In

order to manage the situation, some actions

needed to be done; therefore, the

application of a vocabulary teaching

strategy based on Barlow’s corpora analysis

was one among oth-er alternatives.

Previously to the application of the

strate-gy, a second survey with questions

referring to the levels of English in

recognizable terms for participants was

carried out with the following scale:

1. No English at all

2. Very basic English

3. Basic English

4. Intermediate English

Since students were not familiar with the

Common European Framework of Refer-

ence (CEFR), we avoided to use the standard

terminology. Another further important re-

mark with respect to the participants is that

some of them had studied in rural areas. It is

known that in most of South American

countries, Spanish has the status of official

language; nevertheless other indigenous

languages such as Quechua and Aimara are

regarded official as well. In most of

Peruvian rural regions, native languages

rather than Spanish are used as the primary

source of communication. For Quechuan and

Aima-ran communities for example, Spanish

rep-resents to be their second language (L2),

therefore English was even unknown to

them. The table below informs us of 28% of

students who had no English competence at

all and 58% whose English knowledge was

even below the basic level and 14% with

ba-sic knowledge.

Table 2

Differentiated participants’ English proficiency levels

ENGLISH

KNOWLEDGE

TOTAL

PERCENTAGE

No knowledge at all

No EN

28%

Very basic knowledge

Very basic EN

58%

Basic knowledge

Basic EN

14%

Intermediate knowledge

00%

TOTAL OF NURSES

100%

The data was directly provided by stu-dents

by choosing one of the options to the single-

question obviously done in Spanish: How much

English do you know? 10 students (28%) stated

not to have learned English for-mally after

leaving school. Therefore, they re-garded their

knowledge was highly poor that it did not seem

to be helpful for the English course. A second

group of 21 students (58%) declared to have just

studied English for two or three months either at

a university language center or a language

institute but on their own initiative. It is

commonly accepted that be-cause of their

changeable shifts. Health care professionals are

not able to end up a complete English program.

Only very few students, that

is, 5 (14%), had accepted to have done a com-

plete English basic level program which rep-

resents ten hours a week of formal exposure

to the language during a regular year.

ENGLISH KNOWLEDGE = EN

14%

28%

No EN

Very basic EN

Basic EN

58%

Figure 1. Nurses’ English level

proficiency dis-tribution

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Barlow’s corpora analysis as an ESAP reading comprehension strategy

Barlow´s Analysis as an ESAP reading

com-prehension strategy

Procedure

Being our main goal to prove the

efficacy of an adaptation of Barlow’s

corpora analysis as a strategy for grasping

the meaning of lexi-cal items in an ESAP

reading comprehension course, the research

methodology was divided into three stages.

At the first stage, students were exposed to

an instructional textbook text. The text was

based on a doctor-patient conversation in an

examination situation. The teacher elicited 09

words from the text between single and phras-

al verbs. With no further instructions or ex-

planation on getting their meanings, students

were asked to figure them out on their own.

Students were requested to write down the

meanings in Spanish (their mother tongue), on

a separate piece of paper. Analysis of data

showed that a considerable percentage had

trouble in working out the appropriate mean-

ing of the selected words.

At the second stage, students were provid-

ed with a new short text. They were demand-

ed to circle 15 targeted words that the teacher

acknowledged to be unknown by the students.

After that, they were asked to underline the

word(s) or phrases that came before and/or af-

ter the circled ones. Then, attention was

drawn to the underlined words in order to

analyze them under the following criteria:

- Knowledge from the world

- Knowledge from a previous

English course

- Knowledge from the nursing

profes-sion

The strategy was conducted by making the

learner focus on each circled word in order to

apply Barlow’s procedure. Students were encour-

aged to interpret the meaning of the surround-ing

words closer to the targeted ones. Taking into

consideration Pearson’s suggestion on one hand,

students were encouraged to either rely upon

knowledge they had about the world, or knowl-

edge they got from in their Basic English

courses or knowledge from their profession.

The underlying conception in this activity is

coherent with what Pearson, Lipson and Wix-

son say with respect to reading comprehension

and readers: the interaction between readers and

texts is a complex one but it can be easier if we

make students more aware of what happens to

language in context. On the other hand, for Sav-

ille-Troike, one of the tasks in teaching reading

should be the recognition of a great number of

words through metacognitive knowledge and

comprehension monitoring which will facilitate

understanding and information processing.

The teacher’s role included asking students

questions about the underlined words: What do

you know about the underlined word from

everyday routine? Is the word familiar to you or is

it common and similar to Spanish? Is it a word

that can easily be inferred from the situation? Is it

a word that you learned in your Basic English

courses? Is it a word that you recognize as part of

nursing terminology inventory? Students were

encouraged to understand the meaning of the

underlined words in association with the circled

word (target word) regarding all the aforemen-

tioned possibilities (knowledge from the world,

knowledge from a previous English course and/ or

knowledge from the nursing profession).

At the third stage, the teacher encouraged

students to go over the initial text version

again to circle each target vocabulary item and

underline its immediate surrounding word/s

and/or phrases. Again, careful observation was

called upon to each immediate under-lined

item before and after the targeted words and

ask them to recognize if that specific word was

familiar to him/her through knowledge of the

world, knowledge coming from his/her

previous English course or knowledge coming

from his professional field. The procedure de-

veloped in the third stage was carried out by

students with no teacher’s help. Some explana-

tion of the process is provided:

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Yrma Doris García Rojas

- Knowledge from the world:

Mark weighs 51 Kg, and is 1.65 cm. tall.

Kg. is the abbreviation for kilo which is

the same weight measure term for English as

well as Spanish. The next information is cm,

abbreviation for centimeter. This also can be

implied as measure of the person’s height.

Ad-ditionally, numbers make sense of what

they mean if measure terms are closed to it.

- Knowledge from English and

knowl-edge of the world:

Could you take off your shoes, socks,

and shirt, please?

The phrasal verb take off cannot be easi-ly

interpreted by language learners if shown

isolated. Students with some degree of basic

knowledge in English know that the under-

lined words belong to pieces of clothes that

embody garments such as shoes, socks, shirt,

pants, etc. Clothing is a collective noun that is

incorporated as a topic in the vocabulary list

of almost all Basic English textbooks. On the

other hand, from general knowledge of the

world it is accepted that in a doctor’s office,

patients are required to remove their clothes to

be checked by the doctor.

- Knowledge from the nursing profession

OK, Mark, now I’m just going to take your

temperature.

I`ll take your blood pressure.

The verb take, far from being an apparent

word for English as foreign language learners,

it presents a wide range of meanings in

diverse linguistic contexts. We came across

33 entries in the online Longman Dictionary

with mean-ings such as action, move, remove,

accept, hold something, travel, study, test,

collect, consider, control, etc., etc. Nurses are

expected to be familiar with body vital signs

as part of their professional training: take the

temperature, take the blood pressure, take the

respiration rate, etc. In order to see how

students work out the meaning of the circled,

they were asked to annotate the target words

meaning in Spanish on a piece of paper. The

results can be seen in the annexes.

The findings

After application of adapted Barlow’s

cor-pora analysis as a strategy to enhance

vocab-ulary in English reading

comprehension in an ESAP course, the

findings reflect positive results.

Comparing the data from the first stage

with those from the third, the results show

statistically a significant difference. All

the students (100%) could highly

accurately work out the meaning for the

words/phrases take off,stand and weighs.

Correct Before

Correct After

100

8489

Figure 2. Outcomes on the application of Barlow’s Corpora Analysis strategy

228 | Cátedra Villarreal | V. 5 | No. 2 | julio-diciembre | 2017 |

Barlow’s corpora analysis as an ESAP reading comprehension strategy

Table 3

Percentages differentiation between first and third stages

Target vocabulary

Take off

Stand

Measure

Weighs

Take

Open

Look at

Look up

Swelling

First stage

55 %

47%

55%

66%

68%

84%

61%

21%

16%

Third stage

100

Difference

45%

53%

34 %

34%

21%

23%

47%

18%

Students’ abilities to deal with lexical

meaning were increased in every single

case. The difference is considerably

significant in the phrasal verbs take off

(45%) and look up (47%) and one-word

verb stand (53%). An-other significant

result is that one related to the verb weigh

taking into consideration that its spelling

is strange to the Spanish linguistic system.

Results can also be seen from the oppo-site

way. Figure 3 below treats the percentages based

on negative results by comparing only the

incorrect ones before and after the strategy

application. Incorrect results diminished on the

third stage after the application of Barlow’s

corpora strategy. Three cases had no incorrect

answers at all: take off, stand and measure. The

phrasal verb look up presents a significant per-

centage of decreased incorrectness.

Incorrect Before

Incorrect After

1613

Figure 3. Percentages of decreased incorrectness change for

each lex-ical word

The graphic below intends to show results

in students’ reaction. Reluctance for respond-

ing was diminished after strategy application.

This can be interpreted as the students’ in-

creased accuracy and confidence to designate

meaning to words. Take off, stand and weighs

are good examples. In the same way, looks up

presents a decreased percentage ranging from

34% to 16%. Swelling is a case in which the

percentage might not be regarded consider-

able but the connotations awarded to the word

are highly accurate (Table 4 in appendices).

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Yrma Doris García Rojas

No response Before

No response After

Figure 4. Percentages of students’ reluctance diminished after

Barlows’ cor-pora strategy.

Discussion

The primary objective of this paper was

to demonstrate that an adaptation of

Barlow’s corpora analysis represents a

useful strategy for dealing with vocabulary

in an ESAP read-ing comprehension course.

The results above greatly support the strat-

egy efficacy in dealing with non-transpar-ent

vocabulary in professional and academic

papers. After application of the strategy in

question, the differentiated outcomes in three

statistic graphs show an increased vocabulary

comprehension in the first case (Figure 2), a

decreased confusion degree in incorrect an-

swers in the second (Figure 3) and a dimin-

ished percentage of students’ reluctance in the

third case (Figure 4).

An issue to point out here is that all the

targeted words have no graphic resemblance in

Spanish, a linguistic fact that we consider makes

reading comprehension for specific and

academic purposes much more problem-atic.

The presence of phrasal verbs whose verb and

preposition combination differ from the original

verb meaning on one hand, and that the same

single phrasal verb can convey more than one

meaning, on the other, represents a constraint

for reading comprehension.

To sum up, the most important fact in this

research is what the strategy does for a lan-

guage learner. It helps learners tackle

unknown vocabulary by grasping the words

meaning in a more conscious and trained way.

This mental activity is aligned with trendy

language learn-ing pedagogy models. Current

English Lan-guage Teaching (ELT) leading

specialists ad-vocate learner autonomy as one

of paramount importance and upgrading

learners’ cognitive skills is something that will

contribute to this. We strongly believe that the

adaptation of Bar-low’s analysis strategy

proved to be of great help. Furthermore, the

strategy can indirect-ly help to develop other

reading abilities such as that one related to

English learners’ speed reading. This, in turn,

can encourage nursing professionals for doing

extensive reading on a more regular basis.

Conclusion

Through this research, we could demon-

strate that the adaptation of Barlow’s corpo-ra

analysis strategy based on Barlow’s corpus

linguistics model turns out to be such an ef-

fective strategy for grasping words meanings

in an ESAP reading comprehension course

addressed to a group of post-graduate nursing

Spanish-speaking students with a remarkably

low level of English knowledge.

After explicit strategy training took place,

learners show positive results that can be in-

terpreted as the strategy efficacy for facilitat-

ing understanding of unknown single words

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Barlow’s corpora analysis as an ESAP reading comprehension strategy

as well as phrasal verbs, characterized as pol-

ysemous and with no transparent but opaque

meaning. The strategy requires students to

make analysis of the targeted word context by

looking closely to the surrounding words and

see their meanings by associating them to

conscious analysis that relies on other knowl-

edge learners possess such as that of schemata

or background knowledge, knowledge from a

previous English course and/or knowledge

from the nursing profession.

The strategy in question contributed not

only to the improvement of our learners’ vo-

cabulary interpretation, but also to the

control with a greater or lesser extent of

their own reading comprehension

undertaking certain cognitive mental

processes in autonomous way. This, in turn,

can encourage the learner to get involved in