Sunday, June 16, 2013
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Online reference tools
*Dictionaries and
thesauruses
*Concordances and
corpuses for language analysis
*Translators for
language analysis
*Encyclopedias
for research and project work
1. Dictionaries and
thesauruses
Dictionaries
Whether your students are using bilingual,
semi-bilingual or monolingual learners dictionaries in paper or electronic
form, there is no denying that there is a far greater range of dictionary
reference tools available than was the case even ten years ago.
Virtually all of the major monolingual
learners’ dictionaries are sold with a CD-ROM. These CD-ROMs often have some or
all these features:
·
Search ability (which is not alphabetically based).
· Audio recordings of the words, often in both British
and
American English.
American English.
·
Games and exercises.
·
Information on typical errors.
·
The ability to bookmark and personalize.
·
Thesaurus functionality.
·
Corpus informed information on frequency.
Thesauruses
While electronic dictionaries can be used at all levels, it is worth bearing in mind, initially, that thesauruses are more suited to the intermediate and advanced levels than to the elementary or pre-intermediate levels, where much more language is new to the learner. For higher levels, they can be used to enrich and extend your learners’ vocabulary, whereas lower-level learners might find the variety of language on offer too overwhelming to be of any direct use.
A thesaurus can do wonders for writing projects. It can encourage learners to be more adventurous in their creative writing at the same time as helping them to analyse their output more critically. The activity below can be used as an introduction both to what thesauruses look like and to how they work.
Concordancers and corpuses for language analysis
A concordancer is similar to a search engine in many respects. Essentially, it is a small program that can examine large quantities of text for patterns and occurrences of particular words or phrases. Concordancers are often considered to be the domain of the language researcher or the kind of tool used by writers of grammar references and weighty linguistic tomes. And indeed they are primarily used in this domain. However, they have played an increasingly large part in the lives of materials writers in ELT over the past few years. Being able to make informed decisions on the frequency of words and structures, their collocates and particular positions in the language now influences the writing of much of the printed materials we see in our daily teaching lives, and has transformed textbooks beyond all recognition.
Projects such as COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database), which started in 1980 under the auspices of Professor John Sinclair, have created vast databases of contemporary text which, in the case of COBUILD itself, led to the creation of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary, which was based on
an exhaustive study of the created database, the corpus. Such projects have led to better dictionaries and reference works, but they are also widely used by other writers, and their effects can be clearly seen in the coursebooks we use today, as we have said. But they also have a part to play in the classroom. Let’s turn now to examine how a concordancer works, and what it does. Concordancing involves the use of the program itself (the concordancer) and a corpus, or large body of text, to be analysed. Corpuses are compiled from a variety of sources: written collections such as newspapers or journals, or spoken collections taken from radio and television sources, or gathered on the street in audio format. The corpus of text is tagged, meaning that each word is described by its location, its position in relation to other words in a sentence, its frequency, and so on. The concordancer searches the corpus, asks it about a particular word and how it is used, and then you get a screen of results from a part of the corpus showing the word and enough text either side to be able to understand the context in which it is used. Here we are looking at when the words since and for occur in a corpus of spoken English
Translators for language analysis
Translation software is still in its infancy and at the time of writing remains unreliable and in many instances of dubious quality. However, it is worth mentioning, if only to point out to your learners the dangers it poses if they use it inappropriately, for example to carry out a translation assignment into their own language. The AltaVista site, Babel Fish (http://babelfish.altavista.com/), leads the way in offering quick web-based translation, but you shouldn’t expect great results from anything other than single words or very simple phrases. Nothing you will find on the web will be able to cope with the famous Groucho Marx one-liner, Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
By now you may be asking yourself why we are discussing translation sites at all. The simple answer to that is that it is precisely their fallibility and simplicity that make them interesting vehicles for getting learners to notice the language they are working with, to recognise structures and to process language in an engaging and often amusing way.
An intermediate translation class
Apart from being a fun activity, this involves quite a lot of language processing, and also highlights the problems of relying too heavily on technology.
While the translation back into English opposite isn’t perfect, Babel Fish Translator was never intended to go backwards and forwards between languages like this. The original translation into Spanish was good enough to be understood, and we have used the site a few times to get an idea of the content of certain web pages in languages we do not speak, or even to engage in text chat with speakers of other languages.
Thesauruses
While electronic dictionaries can be used at all levels, it is worth bearing in mind, initially, that thesauruses are more suited to the intermediate and advanced levels than to the elementary or pre-intermediate levels, where much more language is new to the learner. For higher levels, they can be used to enrich and extend your learners’ vocabulary, whereas lower-level learners might find the variety of language on offer too overwhelming to be of any direct use.
A thesaurus can do wonders for writing projects. It can encourage learners to be more adventurous in their creative writing at the same time as helping them to analyse their output more critically. The activity below can be used as an introduction both to what thesauruses look like and to how they work.
Concordancers and corpuses for language analysis
A concordancer is similar to a search engine in many respects. Essentially, it is a small program that can examine large quantities of text for patterns and occurrences of particular words or phrases. Concordancers are often considered to be the domain of the language researcher or the kind of tool used by writers of grammar references and weighty linguistic tomes. And indeed they are primarily used in this domain. However, they have played an increasingly large part in the lives of materials writers in ELT over the past few years. Being able to make informed decisions on the frequency of words and structures, their collocates and particular positions in the language now influences the writing of much of the printed materials we see in our daily teaching lives, and has transformed textbooks beyond all recognition.
Projects such as COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database), which started in 1980 under the auspices of Professor John Sinclair, have created vast databases of contemporary text which, in the case of COBUILD itself, led to the creation of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary, which was based on
an exhaustive study of the created database, the corpus. Such projects have led to better dictionaries and reference works, but they are also widely used by other writers, and their effects can be clearly seen in the coursebooks we use today, as we have said. But they also have a part to play in the classroom. Let’s turn now to examine how a concordancer works, and what it does. Concordancing involves the use of the program itself (the concordancer) and a corpus, or large body of text, to be analysed. Corpuses are compiled from a variety of sources: written collections such as newspapers or journals, or spoken collections taken from radio and television sources, or gathered on the street in audio format. The corpus of text is tagged, meaning that each word is described by its location, its position in relation to other words in a sentence, its frequency, and so on. The concordancer searches the corpus, asks it about a particular word and how it is used, and then you get a screen of results from a part of the corpus showing the word and enough text either side to be able to understand the context in which it is used. Here we are looking at when the words since and for occur in a corpus of spoken English
Translators for language analysis
Translation software is still in its infancy and at the time of writing remains unreliable and in many instances of dubious quality. However, it is worth mentioning, if only to point out to your learners the dangers it poses if they use it inappropriately, for example to carry out a translation assignment into their own language. The AltaVista site, Babel Fish (http://babelfish.altavista.com/), leads the way in offering quick web-based translation, but you shouldn’t expect great results from anything other than single words or very simple phrases. Nothing you will find on the web will be able to cope with the famous Groucho Marx one-liner, Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
By now you may be asking yourself why we are discussing translation sites at all. The simple answer to that is that it is precisely their fallibility and simplicity that make them interesting vehicles for getting learners to notice the language they are working with, to recognise structures and to process language in an engaging and often amusing way.
An intermediate translation class
Apart from being a fun activity, this involves quite a lot of language processing, and also highlights the problems of relying too heavily on technology.
While the translation back into English opposite isn’t perfect, Babel Fish Translator was never intended to go backwards and forwards between languages like this. The original translation into Spanish was good enough to be understood, and we have used the site a few times to get an idea of the content of certain web pages in languages we do not speak, or even to engage in text chat with speakers of other languages.
Encyclopedias for research and project work
It used to be the case that having access to an encyclopedia meant also needing to have a large set of shelves on which to store all of the volumes. This collection of volumes then became a small CD-ROM sitting next to our computers, and these days is more likely to be a collection of web addresses to useful and authoritative sources online. Informational reference sites based on printed material are a good starting point and here we would include paper-based volumes such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as Microsoft Encarta, which was originally published on CD-ROM.
Do check out how often the content is updated. Microsoft Encarta is updated regularly, but more regularly for premium subscribers than for the free version. Wikipedia is updated every minute of every day, but then we have to bear in mind that it has thousands of editors worldwide, with varying degrees of experience. All this must be weighed up when deciding which to use. In the end referencing a variety of sources may help. Sites such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Encarta and the Columbia Encyclopedia can safely be considered both accurate and fairly comprehensive, but with some this may not be the case. It is worth remembering the caveat made in Chapter 7 about Wikipedia being user-produced, and therefore potentially prone to inaccuracies.
The wealth of information contained on these sites opens up the world to our learners in a way that more traditional collections of classroom objects simply can’t. Project work, biographies and other fact-based lessons become less arduous for our learners, leaving them free to concentrate on the language side of things, and able to access the information they need for any particular task from a reliable source. On the next page is an example of a fact-finding activity which involves lower-level learners using encylopedias to find out information about a country they are interested in.
Do check out how often the content is updated. Microsoft Encarta is updated regularly, but more regularly for premium subscribers than for the free version. Wikipedia is updated every minute of every day, but then we have to bear in mind that it has thousands of editors worldwide, with varying degrees of experience. All this must be weighed up when deciding which to use. In the end referencing a variety of sources may help. Sites such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Encarta and the Columbia Encyclopedia can safely be considered both accurate and fairly comprehensive, but with some this may not be the case. It is worth remembering the caveat made in Chapter 7 about Wikipedia being user-produced, and therefore potentially prone to inaccuracies.
The wealth of information contained on these sites opens up the world to our learners in a way that more traditional collections of classroom objects simply can’t. Project work, biographies and other fact-based lessons become less arduous for our learners, leaving them free to concentrate on the language side of things, and able to access the information they need for any particular task from a reliable source. On the next page is an example of a fact-finding activity which involves lower-level learners using encylopedias to find out information about a country they are interested in.
Conclusions
considered the use of online dictionaries, thesauruses and translation services.
examined the role of concordancers and corpuses in lesson planning and teaching.
examined the use of online encyclopedias, and considered how they provide access to
a much-needed ‘world knowledge’ in the classroom.
a much-needed ‘world knowledge’ in the classroom.
taken from HOW TO.. teach english with technology
Nicky Hockly & Gavin Dudeney
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