Corpora revisited! More and better options!

Corpora can be amazingly powerful tools to determine whether two words work together nicely or whether the word or phrase you want to use is appropriate for the meaning you intend and the context in which you want to use it.

Here is an overview of some of the most useful and powerful corpora that I know.  Many props to Mark Davies and the scholars at Brigham Young University for making it and sharing it: https://corpus.byu.edu/variation.asp#x2

And here are some useful corpora:
https://books.google.com/ngrams
https://www.wordandphrase.info/frequencyList.asp
https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

For years, I used the corpora with just really basic searches, and there are great things you can learn, but recently I finally watched some tutorials and there is SO MUCH MORE you can do!  Watch this Youtube tutorial to better understand how to use COCA:

How to Use the COCA

And this one to see how to analyze longer passages (reading or your own essay writing) using Word and Phrase:

Word and Phrase

There are more, but this is a good place to start.  Select one or all of these corpora, and explore!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Speaking Sites

In our Oral English class with Alison McGreggor we've been looking at a lot of pronunciation and prosody sites. I want to share some of them: http://www.manythings.org/ has a ton of resources. I like the minimal pair practice for segmental perception. If a Spanish-speaking student needs help with B-V or a Korean student needs help with F-P http://www.manythings.org/pp/ This may not be explicitly a speaking exercise; however, research suggests that perceiving sounds in your target language leads to being able to produce those sounds (Pennington, 2007). http://www.englishlearning.com/ is another cool pronunciation site that a classmate shared with us. http://www.eltgames.com/ESL-jobs-CoUpIn.htm has some great conversation games. I find games to be one of the best ways to practice speaking. http://speak-read-write.com/tonguetwister.html gives you tongue twisters. I love tongue twisters for practicing speaking, because they give focused practice in context, and they are fun
Read more

FREE (and almost-free) ESL Classes in Austin

Learning a new language is hard.  If you have money to devote to learning English, I highly recommend you study where I work!  UT ESL is awesome! However, sometimes paying for courses is not possible.  Austin provides many free or almost-free opportunities to learn English.  Here is an incomplete list.  The Austin Public Library has a great list of ESL Classes around town.  I will replicate it in part below, with my own commentary, but their list is more complete. UT hosts a free ESL course that is taught by master teachers and practicing teacher interns.  They provide a free class that the students can practice teaching, and ESL students can get an excellent, challenging free classes, Monday through Friday from 5:00 - 7:00.  Space is very limited, so watch the website or get on the e-mail list for information on how to register. Manos de Cristo provides almost-free ($20/semester) classes with morning and evening schedules.  They have computer and citizenship classes too!
Read more

Reading and Writing WHILE IMPROVISING AND COLLABORATING

Hi all, I'm going to do two posts about reading and writing, because this seems like a good place to get on my soap box about Group Improvised Story Telling and Writing! During the past three years, my students and I have really enjoyed and learned from a style of teaching that is somewhat based on a method popularized by Blaine Ray called TPRS . Many people glance at that acronym and think "Total Physical Response," the teaching method developed by James Asher in the 1950s -- and images of children playing Simon Says jump to mind. Now, I am a fan of Simon Says and other teaching strategies that utilize students' kinetic intelligence and physical memory, but for me TPRS has little to do with that. I think TPRStories.com does a good job of explaining TPRS. The authors discuss Dr. Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis, which suggests that we learn languages receptively through high-interest, meaning-focused input that is just a little more difficult than we can produc
Read more