Compleat Lexical Tutor

The Compleat Lexical Tutor (CLT) is a complex website created by Tom Cobb from the Université du Québec, Montréal. It 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).

Note that some components of some these resources work only (or best) with Internet Explorer.

I have chosen to mention a few of them.

Concordancer

The concordancer, simple by today's standards, can be found in the middle of the middle column. You can search for a word and a context word as well. And choose between a number of corpora.
The Link Extractor allows you to copy and paste the URL of a specific concordance page into your own webpage for student reference. For example, click here for fun.

Multiconc

Multiconc makes a short page of concordances for each of a set of words that you enter. Multiconc is a very useful tool for automatically generating activities that heighten students’ awareness of collocation and colligation, especially for words that learners tend to "misacquire". For example, you could enter these words into the red box to make the quiz: manage, allow, force, encourage, make, handle. Another example: momentarily currently directly shortly briefly.  

Once you have created a quiz, you can click on Unframe to make a page suitable for printing. Make sure you use Landscape format.

You can also generate Multi-conc activity consisting of a random set from the Academic Wordlist for students, or they can be  easily taught to generate them for themselves. Click on Test (from the Homepage) – Autotest Project and choose AWL from the drop down list. Choose the number of words to include and then click on the Generate button. Choose your format.

Hypertext Builder

This makes a hypertext version of a text you select and enter. This means that every word is an active link and can be clicked on to open a dictionary entry or concordance page. In The Aviator, the first and last exercises here were made in Hypertext Builder.

Here is a recent news story, saved as a text file (Notepad) and then copied into CLT: BBC used to entice cyber victims.

Making your work available to your students:

1. You can copy and paste the whole line that is given after you click BUILD into an html file (including into a Nicenet page). The instructions on that page are important.
<a href="http://www.lextutor.ca/hypertext/eng/users/Greenpeace_Chernobyl-master.htm " target="_blank" >Greenpeace_Chernobyl-master.htm </a>

2. You can save the webpage and upload it to your own server (e.g., Geocities) and provide a link in the normal way.
http://www.fi.muni.cz/~thomas/CLT/overseas_students-master.htm

Note: at the time of writing (12.5.06), this "copiability" applies only to the concordancing version, not the dictionary version.

Cloze

This cloze builder offers three options and they all involve some degree of linguistic intelligence.

Check Errors with corpus data

Vocabulary Profiler 

This is described in TEACHING WITH TECHNOLOGY by Lindsay Clandfield (Teaching English with Technology). See "Language work" within that article.

This tool may be useful when choosing texts for dictation.