BLOG POST # 5 - Corpora, Concordance, Collocations, Word Frequency

Check out the following sites and report back on how they 

could be used to inform materials development and 

classroom instruction:

Compleat Lexical Tutor: http://www.lextutor.ca/
Corpus of Contemporary American English: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/

These sites are all for helping  learners to develop their vocabulary skills.
Let's take  a look at them for a while..

   Compleat Lexical Tutor contains a vast range of resources of teaching and learning vocabulary and grammar. It is divided into three sections : Learners, Researchers, and Teachers. You can test your vocabulary level by visiting 'Test your lexis', then you can work on the words at the right level where you are weak.

  Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) is freely available online. The corpus allows comparisons between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic, or even between sub-genres such as movie scripts, sports magazines, newspaper editorial or scientific journals.  It contains more than 450 million words of text. It includes texts produced from 1990 to the present time.

  Wordle is a toy for generating 'word clouds' form the text  you provide. The clouds show 
which words appear more frequently in the source text. You can create interesting word pictures and save them into your gallery. 

  Like we check out, these programs provide great number of information about vocabulary and phrase.  
Students can obtain authentic examples of a word or phrase used by native speakers in various registers. Through the authentic examples, students can discover a lot of things about a word or phrase. Simple and quick research also give the learners interests and motivation of the study.

 They can be used in the ESL/ EFL classes in many ways. 

 Teachers can make handouts that provide the students with information about a word, phrase or topic that they can not be found in the traditional textbook.
  Here's an example..  
  "What is the difference between 'many' and 'much'?"
  For the beginners, it is sometimes hard to know the difference when and how to use 'many'  and 'much'. 
  But teacher can provide clear examples with sentences.  By understanding words in   different sentences, students become more aware of language use. 
  
  In my point of view, the greatest advantage  in using these sites is that we can access quantities of real language patterns in variety of contents. . 
  
  What about  'wordle' in the writing class? 
  Here's another example..
  I can ask the students to find several articles related one topic. (for example, 'how noise affects on our neighbours')
  When students gathered some articles, 
 Then, show them how to copy and paste their articles into 'wordle' and generate a word cloud. Students can analyse which word is important and which is less important for understanding topic. Now they can apply their findings into their writings.
This activity provides comprehension of the topic and help them to decide proper use of vocabulary.