- Dictionaries
Traditionally monolingual dictionaries have
been used by higher-level learner, but increasingly there is a wide range of
monolingual dictionaries that have been written for students with a lower level
of language proficiency.
All of the major monolingual learners dictionaries are sold with a
CD-ROM. These CD-ROMs often have some or all of these features:
- Searchability ( which is not alphabetically based )
- Audio recordings of the words, often in both British adn American
English
- Games and exercises
- Information on typical errors
- The ability to bookmark and personalise
- Thesaurus functionality
- Corpus informed information on frequency
- Thesaurus
While electronic dictionaries can be used at
all levels, it is worth bearing in mind, initially, that thesaurus 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-level
learners, they can be used to enrich and extend your 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 analyze their output more
critically.
- Concordances
A concordance 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 occurences of particular words or phrases. Concordances
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 lives, and has transformed textbooks
beyond all recognition.
Concordancing programs:
·
Monoconc ( www.monoconc.com
)
·
Concordance ( www.concordancesoftware.co.uk
)
·
Paraconc (for parallel corpuses) ( www.athel.com )
·
Wordsmith Tools ( http://www.lexically.net
/ wordsmith/index.html )
- Corpuses
When choosing a concordancer, the main
evaluation criterion, apart from the price and ease of use of the software,
will be the type of language you want to work with: spoken or written, American
or british English, legal or journalistic, and so on. These choices will
influence which corpus you decide to query, and what kind of results you will
get. These are some of the most well-known corpuses:
·
British National Corpus ( http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
)
·
COBUILD ( http://www.collins.co.uk/books.aspx?group=155
)
·
International Corpus of English
( http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice-gb/index.htm )
·
American National Corpus ( http://americannationalcorpus.org/
)
·
http://devoted.to/corpora
·
http://www.lexutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html
·
http://ctribble.co.uk/text/Palc.htm
At first, the page may seem daunting, and
indeed there are plenty of options to thinker with, but for a simple
concordance, put the word you want to find out about in the text entry box
marked ‘keyword’, choose the corpus you would like to search for the drop-down ‘In
corpus’ list and then hit the ‘Get concordance’ button.
USE IN CLASS
You can use the corpus for generating test
material such as cloze exercises and exam practice materials. At higher levels,
a corpus can serve as a useful reference tool in the classroom for the more
intricate examples of language use. Parallel concordancers, which compare texts
in two or more languages, can also be useful for examining how structures are
dealt with in opposite page. For another useful discovery activity, try
blanking out the target words in concordances and having your learners work out
which word is missing in each.
The tool which gives access to such a
quantity and richness of language, should be used sparingly and thoughtfully,
when you think that the discovery approach may lead to a better understanding
of the language you are leading with at the moment. You may also find that it
is better to tailor the results of a concordance and present it in the form of
a word processed document, rather than give access to the concordance itself to
your learners. A concordancer can be a powerful ally and helper, even in the
single computer classroom, and is another tool to add to your collection of
useful applications.
- Encyclopedias for research and project work
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.
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.
Source :
How to Teach English With Technology
by Gavin Dudeney & Nicky Hockly
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