http://www.lextutor.ca/
- In Compleat Lexical Tutor I can analyze texts and check word frequency or analyze concordance and then find collocation. Speaking of word frequency, I think this site could be useful for teachers when they are to design appropriate material for class. For example, in a biology class, a teacher can let students go get dissertation or articles and input them to word frequency analyzer. This could make students be aware of what the main terminologies or target vocabularies are without relying only on text.
In the aspect of concordance, I believe this site would be used when students try to find collocation by checking concordance. For instance, for the students who want to speak or write like a native speaker, teacher can get them to analyze concordance and then figure out collocations. Since collocation is a combination of words that frequently occur together, being well-informed of collocation will benefit students: they can have a good command of English more naturally.
2. Corpus of Contemporary American English
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
- As I visited Corpus of Contemporary American English, I could plan four different kinds of lessons, knowing that there were four main categories in a "display" section: list, chart, KWIC, and compare. "List" shows the number of frequency and, as the name implies, a simple list of the sentences that collocate with the target word. So a teacher use "list" to simply explain how many times the target word is used and with how this word can be used in a sentence along with what kind of other words it goes together.
"Chart" displays bar charts that indicates in which field or in what ages the target word is used the most. Also, it shows the matching words or phrases with the target word if a teacher clicks one of bars. Thus a teacher could use this tool in teaching the history of a target word.
"KWIC" is an abbreviated form of Key Word In Context. It shows a target word in a sentence surrounded by possible context with colorful marks. Therefore, a teacher can view the concordance by using this option and use this tool when teaching concordance in writing class.
In my opinion, the most useful tool is "Compare," that shows which word collocates better with the other following word. For example, I wondered about which word would better to collocate with amount. So, I typed "small" and "tiny" in the first two blanks, and then "amount" in the blank below. And the result said "small" is more suitable for "amount" than "tiny". So this tool could help non native teachers teach writing or speaking in EFL classroom.
3. Wordle
- The most remarkable thing of Wordle is that it displays the result as a visual aid. Since it didn't work at computer lab of TESOL class, I did it by myself at home. When I went to "create" section and typed two to three paragraphs then clicked "go," the picture below came out. The fun thing was that in the picture, the word of high frequency was marked big, and the word with low frequency was marked small. Since this tool showed vivid visual aids, I thought this would be effective when a teacher is to teach young learners about word frequency.
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기