Blog #5: Corpora, Concordance, Collocations, Word Frequency

 

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

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

 

Concordancing programs and linguistic corpora are kinds of tools that contain large amounts of information like vocabulary and grammar. Users can sort certain vocabulary and grammar by determining categories. To be more specific, concordance searches for combination of words, parts of words and occurrences of a word within a corpus and shows the immediate context. Using http://www.lextutor.ca/ and http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ websites, teachers can prepare teaching materials related to vocabulary activities and grammar. Teachers can collect examples of language and usage for making exercises. Teachers can also find the lists of collocations, words that are commonly found together, using these concordancing programs.

[This is the picture showing the lists of collocation "give up" using http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ site.]

Using concondances, teachers can look at the context where a given word or phrase appears. Students can learn the authentic and meaningful context. Once the teacher chooses the context, he/she can create a "word clouds" using http://www.wordle.net/. The images the teacher created show words that appear in the text more frequently. So this images can be used usefully in the pre-reading activity to promote the students have interests and predict the text.

[Word Clouds]

 

Concordancing programs and corpora can practically be applied to the second language acquisition and teaching. Teachers can provide students with authentic examples and multiple meaning of a word or phrase.