ICT 4 ELT Portals

Corpus-based language study

Compiled and annotated by
James Thomas,
Faculty of Informatics,
Masaryk University,
Brno, Czech Republic.

This webpage contains links to websites about corpus-based language study for teachers and quite advanced students.

1. Related Reading – available online
2. Using some online corpora and corpus tools
3. Some Applications of Data Driven Learning
4. Some Other Lexical Tools

1. Related Reading – available online

2. Using some online corpora and corpus tools

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• Online corpora

  http://www.fi.muni.cz/~thomas/EAP/concordancers.htm

  This is an annotated portal linking recommended online tools – corpora and concordancers.

• Word sketch Engine (WSE)

  http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/sampler/

  Register here to use the program, which accesses the British National Corpus.You may use the website at no cost for demonstration, research and teaching purposes only.

• Introduction to searching for answers using the WSE

  http://www.fi.muni.cz/ICT4ELT/material/manual/ 01_Intro_to_Using_Corpora_in_Language_Teaching_%28Eng%29.pdf

  This is part of the manual created for the ICT4ELT trainer training course (Czech Republic 2005-06).

• Corpus Query Language

  http://www.fi.muni.cz/~thomas/corpora/CQL/

  The notes on this page explain creating detailed searches of the British National Corpus when using the Word Sketch Engine.

• Word Sketch Engine Searches

  http://www.fi.muni.cz/~thomas/corpora/searches/index.htm

  This website demonstrates how many language questions can be answered used the Word Sketch Engine.

• Bootcat

  http://corpora.fi.muni.cz/bootcat/

  This web interface allows you to create corpora of webpages based on your own target word searches.

3. Some Applications of Data Driven Learning

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• Kibbitzers

  Each kibbitzer page contains the discussion of a language problem. This problem may be mainly lexical (mostly to do with vocabulary), syntactic (mostly to do with grammar), or discoursal (how ideas are linked), or it may be from more than one of these areas. 

  Examples from the University of Birmingham
  http://www.eisu.bham.ac.uk/Webmaterials/kibbitzers/indexes/indexchron.htm

  Examples from the University of Michigan
  http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/kibbitzer.htm

• The Compleat Lexical Tutor

  http://132.208.224.131/

  This is a suite of programs which contains a large number of resources for studying and testing yourself (column one), for researching language (column two), and for teachers to create interactive online resources for their students (column three). ). To open the concordancer, click on "Concordance" in the middle column.

• Using the Compleat Lexical Tutor

  http://www.fi.muni.cz/~thomas/CLT/using

  This contains some notes and examples about some of the modules.

• Correcting Written Work

  http://www.fi.muni.cz/~thomas/cww/

  This website contains information and links for the seminar of the same name. The third tool mentioned here is the Word Sketch Engine, complete with examples of how it can help with correcting written work.

• Error Correction

  http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/ErrorCorrection/prepositions1.htm

  This page contains a prepositions exercise and a link to corpus examples in which the correct answer is implied.

4. Some Other Lexical Tools

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• Word net

  http://poets.notredame.ac.jp/cgi-bin/wn/

  This is like a computerised thesaurus, but it links many lexical relations, e.g., hyponyms, meronyms, troponyms.

• Visual Thesaurus

  http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

  This is the demo site of this popular program. You can see the results of some exquisite programming. And it includes pronunciation. From the left of the screen, follow Teacher Resources – they abound!

• Manual

  http://www.fi.muni.cz/ICT4ELT/material/manual/14_Some_Online_Synonym_Tools_(Eng).pdf

  This short PDF file contains some introductory information about Wordnet, Visual Thesaurus, the thesaurus tool in the Word Sketch Engine and the Hypertext Builder in the Compleat Lexical Tutor.