Blog #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:

 

1. Compleat Lexical Tutor: http://www.lextutor.ca/

    When teachers, especially EFL teachers, teach vocabularies, they often convey only the particular words and corresponding meanings in first language. However, some vocabularies could have different meanings according to collocations or context. Thus, learners should also be exposed to some lanugage use either, and recognize what other words or expressions the word goes with.
    This website provides amazing concordance system. Like the picture below, if we type in a particular word, we can see amount of examples in sentences. Then we can recognize not only a part of speech of the word, but also when and where the word is used. Since it is so simple and easy, even busy teachers can use it easily and quickly.
    In an inductive teaching, a teacher can use it providing some examples first having the word deleted. Then, learners can guess what the word should be as they read the other part of the sentences.

2. Corpus of Contemporary American English: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

     Whereas a concordance means a list of words used in a body of work, with their immediate contexts (by Wikipedia), a corpus is a large and structured set of text. And they are used to do statistical and linguistics analysis, checking occurrences or validaing linguistic rules on a specific universe.
     On this website, we can type in separately a collocation as well as the word which we want to see the list of. Also, we can choose and see in which area the word is used such as magazine, newspaper, academic, or spoken. After conditioning searching for the list of corpus, on the right side of the page, the number of frequency of the word use is presented and below it, a set of text is shown.
     Some of the uses would be difficult for learners, if they have academical or technical terms in it. Thus, it is doubtful if it could be treated by young learners. Teachers, however, could benefit from word frequency, especially, when they consider which words should be taught. High frequency of words should be taught and used to learners first.

3. Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/

    
     Wordle is to generate  “word clouds” from text we provide. On this website, we don't even need to sign and log in the site, but just create your own word clouds. Click the 'create' tap, paste in a bunch of text, and go. That's all. In the clouds some words are given greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the text. Also, you can make the clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Moreover, you can simply save them and quickly print them out.
     I once used this site as a brainstorming in a pre-reading activity. Learners look at the word cloud and they guess what kind of topic or theme today's text will be about. If a teacher color the words or shemes, it will visually give more pleasure and motivation to them.