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.
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
Unlike the other
components, this one is pre-processed. It is a very good example of how
corpus data can be used to point out errors and the range of
alternatives from which the right form can be chosen.
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.