ICTs and Foreign Language Teaching (Designing activities with technology)

CARLOS MINOTHA

JHONNY ARCOS

WHAT IS A “CORPUS”?

•Corpus  is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed)

•A corpus (pl. corpora) is a collection of language samples, written and/or spoken, processed on computer using one or more software tools for the purpose of analyzing the language itself for word use/usage and frequency and mainly for linguistic and dictionary use (Flowerdew, 1996). There are two types: specialized and general. The first may be common in ESP, while the other in EFL/ ESL.

WHAT IS CONCORDANDER?

•A concordancer is in the present sense computer software that enables practitioners and learners to look for the concordance of a certain word in a given corpus (e.g. Monoconc/pro, Wordsmith, …etc.).

WHAT IS CONCORDANCE? Concordance. A concordance is a screen display of a 

word or phrase as it is used by many different speakers in the Corpus. The word or phrase we are interested in is shown in the middle of the screen, 

highlighted in some way, with the rest of the text  if any  before and after it.

A basic manual concordance taken from Shakespeare “Romeo and Juliet”

COLLOCATION

•A collocation is a term used to describe two or more words that usually go together. They can be verb-preposition/particle (to believe in, give up); verb-noun (to save money); adjective-noun (chronic symptoms); or noun-noun (household maintenance), etc.

WHAT IS COLLOCATION?•COLLOCATION refers to a relationship between words that frequently occur together•The words together can mean more than the sum of their parts (The Times of India, disk drive) - other examples: hot dog, mother in law

•Examples of collocations–noun phrases like strong tea and weapons of mass destruction–phrasal verbs like to make up, and other phrases like the rich and powerful.

Teaching idioms

An idiom is a word or phrase which means something different from its literal meaning. Idioms are common phrases or terms whose meaning is not real, but can be understood by their popular use.

Because idioms can mean something different from what the words mean it is difficult for someone not very good at speaking the language to use them properly. Some idioms are only used by some groups of people or at certain times.

Dictionaries

•The LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations•Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English•Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms•Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms•Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms

REFERENCES•How to use concordances in teaching English. Some suggestionshttp://www.nsknet.or.jp/~peterr-s/concordancing/usingconcs.html•Using concordance programs in the Modern Foreign Languages classroomhttp://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod2-4.htm•Use of corpora, corpus linguistics and corpus analysis in the context of language learning and teachinghttp://www.corpora4learning.net/•7 corpora created by http://view.byu.edu•Corpus of Contemporary American Englishhttp://corpus.byu.edu/coca/•British National Corpushttp://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/•Concordance the web in real-timehttp://www.webcorp.org.uk/live/index.jsp•A corpus of academic speech collected at the University of Michigan and a concordancer http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/micase/