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:


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


The website is similar to the 'Corpus of Contemporary American English'. At this website, when you type the word, you can see various usages of the word in the hundreds of contexts.

It's not that difficult for the students to guess the meaning of the words even though they see them for the first time because there are hundreds of hints that contexts show. Students can use the website to preview and review the class. Plus, the teacher can give an activity to the students so called 'Guessing Game' by giving them a list of words that they don't kow yet. Then each group of 4 students negotiate each other to figure out the meaning. In this process, they can be accustomed to how to use those words not just what it is.


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

This website is offered by BYU. When you type the words or phrases that you want to know, for example 'give up', it searches 450 million words to find out how the phrase is used in the context and shows the result. Once you see the result, you can get the information about the frequency of the phrase and how to use it. It is much more effective to understand the meaning of corpus through the context than memorizing it.

To apply this website to the class, let the students read the passage first, and make a few groups out of 3 or 4 students. Then they discuss the meaning of the words they don't know together and use the website to guess the meaning of them. In that way, they can understand the meaning of the words and how to use it in the real context.

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

I saw this wordle for the first time a few days ago in TLS class. The very first impression of it was 'Cooool!'. I think this tool can be used as a guidance material for the students before they actually start reading. Students can see the most frequently used words just by glancing the wordle, and they can predict what the article they are going to read is about. It helps them to understand the content much easier than reading it without any support.

I come up with the idea of using the wordle to teach a newspaper article.
Here's an article called 'Sometimes, we want prices to fool us'.
(Click the picture below if you want to see the full article.)

I draged some part of the article, copied and pasted it to the wordle website. Then, I was able to create my own wordle like below.
(The reason I pasted SOME part of the article is that I coudn't paste the whole article. I tried several times but failed. There could be a limit on the number of the words I can paste at a time, but I don't know what the exact reason is. If there's anyone who knows why, please let me know.)

As you can see, the output feature is quite colorful and beautiful. You can change the layout and font through the menu button on the left top.
In this wordle, we can see prices, coupon, sales and discounting, etc. Just by glancing it, we can  make a guess what this article is about. Plus, if there're several big words that students don't know, they can figure out the meaning of those words through the reading process by themselves.
Because of the successive process, guessing-reading-realizing by themselves(students), I think the wordle is a very effective tool to use in the real reading class.