ONLINE REFERENCE TOOLS
Dictionaries and thesauruses
Dictionaries
Whether your students are using bilingual, semi-bilingual or monolingual learners dictionaries in paper or electronic from, there is no denying that there is a far greater range of dictionary reference tolls available than was the case even ten years ago. Here we will be focusing on monolingual dictionaries. Traditionally these have been used by highelevel learners, but increasingly there is a wide range of monolingual dictionaries that have been written for students with a lower level of language proficiency.
Virtually all of the major monolingual learners dictionaries are sold with a CD-ROM. These CD-ROMs often have some or all these features:
- Searchabikity (which is not alphabetically based)
- Audio recordings of the words, often in both British and American English.
- Games and exercise
- Information on typical errors
- The ability to bookmark and personalize
- Thesaurus functionality
- Corpus informed information on frequency
Clearly these electronics dictionaries provide a powerful resource for students working on their own and for you in the classroom. In the classroom you can have the dictionary available at all times to check the meanings of words, and if you are fortunate enough to have a PC linked to a data projector or interactive whiteboard, you can integrate the dictionary into your day-to-day teaching seamlessly and also carry out dictionary use training sessions more effectively.
Thesauruses
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.
Once they have seen how the thesaurus works, have them look back at some of their writing and identify the words and phrases they tend to overuse. Encourage them to take advantages of their new thesaurus skills to research alternatives to make their writing more interesting and varied. This kind of fine-tuning of their language skills is particularly useful at examination preparation levels where an individual writing style can help them to stand out from the crowd.
Concordancers and corpuses for Language analysis
A concordance is similar to a search engine in many respect. Its 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 a domain of the language researcher of the kind of tool used by writers of grammar references and weighty linguistic tomes. And indeed they are primarily used in this domain.
Concordancing involves the use of he program itself ( the concordancer) and a corpus of large body of text, to be analysed. Corpus are compilied from a variety of sources : written collection such as newspapers or journals, or spoken collection taken from radio and television sources, ang gathered on the street in audio format. The corpus of text is ragged, meaning that each word is described by its location, its position in relation to other in a sentence, its frequency, and soon. The concordance search the corpus , asks it about the particular word and how it is used, and then get a screen of result 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 acorpus of spoken English
- He said well you’ve been right since Christmas and if you say it is.
- Aren’t you ? No I haven’t been out since Boxing night
- I had haven’t sat down since half past seven.
- They’ve been married for a couple of years.
- You should of said oh I just come up for a few days.
- Blair had to look your toes. We have still got that tape for a couple of a weeks.
As you see from these simple example, it is quite possible to extrapolate basic rules abot the way for and since work.
Conordancing programs
Consordansing Programs
- Corpuses
When choosing a concordancer, the main evaluation criterion, apart from the price an 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 result you will get. These are some of the most well-known corpuses, please note that access is usually through subscription:
- International Corpus of English (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/project/ice-gb/index.htm), 1 million words.
For more complete guide to available corpuses go to David Lee’s City University of Hong Kong collection at http://devoted.to/corpora. One such resources is the Lextutor onlice concordancer designed by Chris Greaves at The Politechnic University of Hong Kong (http://www.lextutor.ca/concodancers/concord_e.html).
- Use In Class
The use of corpus in the classroom is for generating test material such as close exercises and exam partice materials. At higher lever, a corpus can serve as a useful reference tool in the classroom for the more intricate example of language use. For example, “What the difference between glisten and glitter?” Parallel concordancer, which compare text in two or more language, can also be useful for examining how structures are dealt with in first and second language.
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. the Alta Vista site, Babel Fish(http:/babelfush.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.
By now you may be asking your self why we are discussing translation sitesat all.the simple answer to that is that it is precisely their Fallibility and simplicity that make them interesting vehicles for getting lerners to notice the language they are working with, to recognise structures and process language in an engaging and often amusing way.
An Intermediate Translation Class.
While the translation back into english opposite insn’t perfect, Babel Fish translator was never intended to go backwards nad 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, oe even to engage in text chat witn speakers ao 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.
Do check out how often the content is updated. Microsoft Encrata, Wikipedia, all of this must be weighed up when deciding with to use. In the end referencing a variety of sources may help.
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 reliable source.
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
Dictionaries, there is no denying that there is a far greater range of dictionary reference tolls available than was the case even ten years ago. Clearly electronics dictionaries provide a powerful resource for students working on their own and for you in the classroom.
Thesauruses, 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.
Concordancers and corpuses for Language analysis
A concordance is similar to a search engine in many respect. Its is a small program that can examine large quantities of text for patterns and occurrences of particular words or phrases.
Consordansing Programs
- Corpuses
- Use In Class
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.
An Intermediate Translation Class.
While the translation back into english opposite insn’t perfect, Babel Fish translator was never intended to go backwards nad forwards between languages like this.
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.
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