2015 Spring: 四技通識選修-Writing2
Internet and Writing (2)
Corpus and Concordancer
| 1. | Review |
| Share your experiences in using the tools we discussed last week. | |
| Share your experiences in using the tools to look up the words when reading the BBC news. | |
| 2. | Dictionary Labels |
| Learner dictionaries give students useful information about when and where to use a word or phrase through labels. | |
| Some common dictionaries labels. 1. formal 2. informal 3. spoken 4. old-fashioned |
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| 3. | Concordancer |
| A concordancer is a kind of search engine designed for language study. If you enter a word, it looks through a large body of texts, called a corpus, and lists every single example of the word.This lets you look at a word in context, see how common it is, and see the style associated with it. Such a tool is a computer-specific tool that you may not be familiar with from learning English by more traditional ways, but it is worth spending some time experimenting with it and getting to know how to use it.
In addition to showing you a clear and objective picture of language use, concordancer can help you with words that you are unsure of. You can use it to compare your usage with that of native speakers. Further reading at http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/concordancers.html |
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| 4. | What is a corpus? |
| A collection of texts, spoken and/or written, which has been designed and compiled based on a set of clearly defined criteria. (e.g. British National Corpus, BNC Spoken Corpus , Brown Corpus)Corpus users use a type of software called a “concordancer” to search for a specific word or phrase they want to find. The concordancer searches the whole database and then provides all the sentences containing that word or phrase. In this way, the user can see how it has been used by many different people, and can study its meaning, grammar, and so on.
Corpora (that’s the plural of corpus) are now used by many people involved in language teaching. All of the modern learners’ dictionaries are based on corpora. People who study grammar and how best to teach it use corpora to discover new grammar principles NOT found in older grammar books. e.g. Cambridge International Corpus (Cambridge Online Dictionary). Different corpora |
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| 5. | Monolingual online concordancers |
| 1. VLC Concordancer http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk 2. NTNU Web Concordancer http://llrc.eng.ntnu.edu.tw/English/search/default.htm developed by Dr. Howard Chen. 3. Online Concordancer by Dr. Tom Cobb http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/ |
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| 6. | Bilingual online concordancers |
| Parallel corpus–A parallel corpus is a collection of texts, each of which is translated into one or more other languages than the original. | |
| CANDLE- National E-Learning Project (計畫主持人: 清華大學劉顯親教授) http://candle.cs.nthu.edu.tw/newcandle/Home_C.asp |
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| TotalRecall—A bilingual concordancer http://candle.fl.nthu.edu.tw/totalrecall/totalrecall/totalrecall.aspx?funcID=1 | |
| 7. | Assignments |
| 1. Preview Google Syntax | |
| 2. Add the links of your classmates’ blogs to yours. (layout=>add a gadget=>blog list | |
| 3. Add the links to the tools we learn today. (layout=>add a gadget=>link list) | |
| 4. Preview the following article: What is a collocation? | |