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Further study
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Further studyThese sessions have been principally concerned with training you in an approach to accessing the GRAMMAR OF VOCABULARY you need when you need it. A lot of current work in language and linguistics, including that relevant to learning foreign languages, gives priority to the structural elements of vocabulary over sentence grammar. As far as concordancing is concerned, there are still many more things you can do with the CCS. And the CCS is not the only concordancer on the net. Some others are listed below and there are some available for purchase on CD, though not all of them have corpora included. As you read through the sites linked below, you will see other activities and approaches, and of course, other links! It is possible to create your own corpus, though this is beyond the realm of this particular Introduction. If you this is of interest to you, read Improvising corpora for ELT: quick-and-dirty ways of developing corpora for language teaching by Christopher Tribble and The Learner as Corpus Designer by Guy Aston. Obtaining copyright permission to use texts is a complex issue and corpora based on out-of-copyright data cannot represent a language in its current state. An important practical issue for the language learner: what do you do with the answers to your questions? Tom Cobb has written about this: Giving learners something to do with concordance output. Tom Cobb’s article, Breadth and depth of lexical acquisition with hands-on concordancing, describes an experiment using concordancing with students who needed to acquire a large vocabulary quickly. An article by him about using concordance software to provide learners with a rich language learning experience can be found at Concordancing in the CEGEPs. Corpora in the Teaching of Languages and Linguistics by Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson contains the authors’ summary of their book. Vance Stevens’ article: Concordancing with Language Learners: Why? When? What? and his Concordancing with Students Gregory Handley describes his experiment introducing Data Driven Learning with his Japanese students in Sensing the Winds of Change. Click here for the University of Stirling’s Introducing the concordance site. Some ResourcesTim Johns Data-driven Learning Page Mike Scott co-authored Microconcord (a DOS concordancer with 2 million corpus – still good and fast) with Tim Johns and then the more sophisticated Wordsmith Tools (for Windows). If you would like to look into concordances and corpora more deeply, try this tutorial by Catherine N. Ball. Tom Cobb’s The Compleat Lexical Tutor includes a range of applications of corpus work to vocabulary teaching. Spaceless: This concordancer takes the text of a web page and creates a list of sentences that contain the search term. The VLC Web Concordancer (the Virtual Language Centre) provides basic concordance search and retrieval functions using corpus files which are located on the VLC server. Manuel Barbera's Corpora and Corpus Linguistics portal My annotated portal Concordancing on the web. Ø Glossary of terms used in concordancing literature Ø Using computers in Linguistics glossary
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