1 Introduction and rationale

Within the German dual training system, students spend 70% of their study time learning on-the-job at a company and the remaining 30% in publicly funded vocational schools. In vocational schools, teachers of English as a foreign language usually hold English classes in various departments and must thus design relevant learning activities for a diverse student body that could potentially range from future car mechanics to hairdressers-to-be. The three didactical principles “competence development”, “activity orientation”, and “cooperation of learning places” serve as basis for the classes held in vocational schools (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2009: 1-2) and, in English lessons, the four areas of competence – namely receptive skills, productive skills, interaction, and mediation – must be addressed (Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium 2009: 4).

For all four aforementioned areas of competence, students will need to be familiar with vocabulary that is relevant to their future working lives. Consequently, the teacher needs to have specialized knowledge of the kind of idiomatic vocabulary that is used in a particular professional domain. I have observed that existing coursebooks often do not provide genuinely meaningful or relevant vocabulary for specific fields of vocational education in sufficient quantity. This chapter therefore focuses on building a virtual corpus and utilizing it for compiling a list of subject-specific, relevant vocabulary in order to develop language learning activities for specific areas of vocational education.

2 Corpus, tools and methods

For building a specialized virtual corpus, the Wikipedia Corpus on the web-based corpus interface www.english-corpora.org/wiki is used. The strength of the Wikipedia Corpus is that it allows to build customized virtual corpora for diverse topics and then conduct searches within these highly specific virtual corpora. This can be used for creating lists of relevant specialized vocabulary. For English teachers in vocational schools, it is highly important to know which vocabulary is genuinely meaningful and relevant for each profession. Crucially, simply looking up a list of words in a dictionary would probably lead to a biased selection of words which the teacher assumes are important, often without direct experience in the students’ future field of work. Furthermore, there may not be one-to-one equivalences between the teacher and students’ L1 and English. After the virtual corpus has been created, the virtual corpus will be utilized to gather a list of relevant, meaningful and practice-oriented vocabulary. This list will serve as a basis for developing language learning activities which can easily be embedded into a practical use in the classroom.

3 Step-by-step guide

Teacher preparation

Building a virtual corpus

1. Use the browser of your choice to access https://www.english-corpora.org/.
2. Go to the tab “my account” and click on “Register”. Fill out the registration form and click “SUBMIT”. Registration is mandatory and free of charge. You will get an email with a registration link. Confirm your registration by clicking the link in the email. Go back to the website https://www.english-corpora.org/ and log in.
3. Click on the tab “home” and then click on the “Wikipedia Corpus”.
4. Click on the tab “Texts/Virtual” and then on the tab “Create corpus” (see Fig. 1).

5. Enter the word cosmetic in the field “Title word(s) *”. Choose 100 in the field “# pages” to limit your search to 100 articles. Click “Submit” (see Fig. 2).

6. Now you have to look through the results in order to check whether the texts are appropriate to use. You can click on a title to see the full text. You can then select all texts by ticking the empty white box to the left of the “100” and manually untick any texts you wish to exclude. Give your virtual corpus a name, e.g. “SKIN”, by typing it into the “SAVE AS” field and then click on “SUBMIT” to save your virtual corpus (see Fig. 3).

7. You have now built a virtual corpus on the topic of skin. In this example, there are 76 articles with a total of 42,749 words (see Fig. 4).

Utilizing the virtual corpus for compiling a vocabulary list

1. Click on the tab “SEARCH” to use the virtual corpus. You might need to refresh the website and then click on the tab “Texts/Virtual” in order to see your newly built virtual corpus (see Fig. 5).

2. Click on the tab “Collocates”. Enter the word skin into the box “Word/phrase”. Click on the field “[POS]” right to the word “Collocates”. The box “Insert PoS” will appear. Click on this box and choose “adj.ALL”. “_j*” appears in the field “Collocates”. Choose the left “1” to find collocates which appear immediately before the target word. Choose the virtual corpus “SKIN” by clicking on it. It is very important that you choose your custom-built virtual corpus, otherwise the whole Wikipedia Corpus will be queried. Finally, click on “Find collocates” (see Fig. 6).

3. In this example, I obtained a list of 39 collocates sorted by how often they appear in your virtual corpus (see Fig. 7).

4. You now need to filter the words in order to just get relevant words that describe skin. You can see the context of the word by clicking on it. Here, the first word which seems inappropriate is dead. By clicking on it, you can see that it is not used for describing skin, but rather skin cells. Filter out such words not describing skin itself (see Fig. 8).

5. In this example, the following words are filtered out: dead, daily, common, surrounding, organic, right, richer, related, rejuvenate, natural, individual, improving, general, exotic, and basic. In order to get the most meaningful words, you might also delete the words old, and great from your list because these are very general and thus do not need to be taught specifically. You may also want to exclude the word laggy from the list, because it is a colloquial word, which is not used to describe skin professionally. Next, make a list of the adjectives you have selected. You may also add translations (see Table 2).

Preparing teaching materials for language learning activities

Students need to know how to use newly-learnt words in written and spoken language correctly in order to utilize them holistically. They further should be able to use the new words in all four areas of competence. Teachers should make sure that students get the opportunity to learn the new words and that they get the chance to practise the pronunciation as well as the spelling. The compiled vocabulary list allows teachers to develop a range of language learning activities. In this chapter, I demonstrate how to use the list in Table 2 to create a controlled language learning activity, in the form of a cloze text, as well as a communicative language learning activity, in the form of a taboo card game.

Gap-filling activities can be used to familiarize students with both the meaning and spelling of new words. The teacher needs to prepare a cloze text. Depending on the level of the individual students, the words which should be filled in the gaps can be displayed below the text as an assistance or the first letter of each word can be given in the gaps. Differentiation in mixed-ability classes is thus made possible. An example of a cloze text – with an attached sample solution – can be found in Appendix I. Whilst developing a cloze text, sentences taken directly from the corpus can be used in order to ensure that authentic examples are demonstrated.

The vocabulary list compiled from the virtual corpus can also be used to create taboo playing cards. This is a game, which encourages the students to communicate and use new vocabulary in spoken language. This method can be used after the new words have been introduced and then in different stages of the lesson sequence in order to revise the vocabulary. Exemplary taboo playing cards can be found in Appendix II.

4 Options and further ideas

Students in vocational education need to know subject-specific adjectives in order to describe different words in greater detail. Students must know meaningful adjectives for varying situations and a virtual corpus is an appropriate instrument for creating highly specific vocabulary lists in the field of vocational education. The outlined procedure and the exemplary language learning activities of this chapter can be immediately used for the dual apprenticeship as a hairdresser. The exemplary topic can also straightforwardly be utilized for the dual apprenticeship as a beautician/cosmetician.

This chapter demonstrates that general adjectives are not sufficient for describing specific words. This also applies for other professional disciplines in the field of vocational education, for example metal work, wood work, electrical engineering, glass engineering, home economics, social education, healthcare professions, and many others. The procedure for building and utilizing a virtual corpus can easily be adapted and used for different types of schools within the field of vocational education. The vocabulary lists can be further expanded based on the proficiency level of the learners. Also, the virtual corpus can be used in order to compile vocabulary lists of different word classes, for example subject-specific nouns, verbs, and other collocations (e.g. verb-noun collocations).

5 Caveats and limitations

Since the Wikipedia Corpus is a compilation of written articles, it may not always be adequate for teaching spoken language. Nevertheless, the Wikipedia Corpus can provide a useful, general overview of the kind of words and collocations which are relevant for, and frequently used in specific areas.

Note that whilst using the website https://www.english-corpora.org/, from time to time a message will appear telling you to upgrade your account. You can just wait for a few seconds and then click on “Click here to continue with your search”. The message will disappear and you do not need to upgrade your account (see Fig. 9).

6 Conclusion

In this chapter, I explained how to build a virtual corpus and utilize it for developing language learning activities for specific areas of vocational education. The three didactical principles as well as the four areas of competence relevant to vocational education – especially in the dual apprenticeship model – were taken into account. After building the virtual corpus, I explained how to use it to compile a subject-specific vocabulary list. This vocabulary list served as a basis for developing two language learning activities. These activities can be immediately embedded into teaching English in classes for hairdressers as well as beauticians / cosmeticians. I further explained how the aforementioned procedure can be adapted for different types of schools and various professional disciplines within vocational education. In addition, I mentioned options for adapting the activities to heterogeneous levels of proficiency. In conclusion, the procedure of building a virtual corpus for a specific area of vocational education in order to compile a vocabulary list to develop teaching materials has proven itself to be user-friendly and broadly applicable for language teachers in the field of vocational education.

7 Resources and references

Kultusministerkonferenz. 2008. Rahmenlehrplan für den Ausbildungsberuf Friseur/Friseurin: Beschluss der Kultusministerkonferenz vom 10.04.2008. https://www.kmk.org/fileadmin/pdf/Bildung/BeruflicheBildung/rlp/Friseur.pdf (14 October, 2020).

Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium. 2009. Rahmenrichtlinien für das Unterrichtsfach Englisch/Kommunikation in der Berufsschule. https://www.nibis.de/nli1/bbs/archiv/rahmenrichtlinien/eng_bs_an.pdf (14 October, 2020).

Wikipedia Corpus on english-corpora.org. https://www.english-corpora.org/wiki/ (14 January, 2021).

8 Appendices

Appendix I: Cloze text

Appendix II: Taboo