Sites Review
1. Compleat Lexical Tutor: http://www.lextutor.ca/
You can do anything for enhancing your vocabulary and grammar in this site. Simply you can look up the meaing of a word but you can go further to check actual word usages in a variety of contexts or frequncy-based usage or vocabulary anayses in any texts of learners' choice, grammar tests through concordance, etc.. Most texts are from academic sources and thus this will be useful for English learners for academic purpose.
Benefits for teachers will be taken by applying activities such as "cloze" or "I-D word". The contexts, however, should be cautiously chosen considering students' level.
2. Corpus of Contemporary American English: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
As a huge container of colloctions of words sourced from various up-to-date materials i.e. speech, magazines, newspapers, academic writings, etc, this will be an effective tool for getting vocabulary knowledge of actual usage and frequency. In terms of opinions that vocabulary learning needs more lexical approach rather than just memorising word by word, this site will offer chances for learners to be exposed to various contextual usage of words, concordance and collocation. For example, when I searched "tired", it showed high freqency usage with, "muscle" (magazine section) as a collocation, "tired muscle". On the other hand, in a spoken section, "I'm tired." ranked at the top. Here we can say that learners' understanding of vocabulary could be expanded greatly, depending on section setting or search condition. Additionally it will be interesting to see how the word frequency changes historically.
3. Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/
Differing from those other two sites, this is really eyecatching from the first sight. Visual attractiveness could be an effective motivator to every learner esp. young ones who may feel as if wandering through the maze if in the above sites. Creating the word "cloud" from the texts of your choice, you could get visual understanding of word frequency. The higher the frequncy is the bigger the font gets. One thing I feel sorry for is that only JAVA supports the site, which requires additional works to get everything done in order.
How they could be used for material development and classroom instruction :
First of all I think students should be well informed of the importance of vocabulary learning in the contexts especially in writing and speaking. L2 learners wanting chances to be in real communicative situations need to be exposed to various sources of contextual materials to avoid producing weird expressions or selecting words out of use. In this regards, Lextutor and corpus, which look somewhat complex to use at first sight though, will be strongly recommendable tools for supplementing class activities or self-study. Considering the complexity of sample sentenses or the overwhelming number of lists, more explicit user guide and cautious consideration of learner level should be provided.
For instruction ideas :
- Advanced learners : "Building up My Dictionary" could be suggested. The students will create their own dictionary based on given reading materials during class, for which 'lextuor' or 'corpus' can be used. It would be better if teachers set up the dictionary format and let students just fill in what are required. The meaning of the word, concordance or collocation samples (3 ~ 5) and my own sentences will be good to be included. If a certain target is given such as 10 words per week, the number of new words will be increased, which will remain as a good liguistic assets of learners.
- Young learners : "Guess what is the busiest word ?" game could be created. The texts prepared by the teacher are given to the leaners. And the leaners just guess which word might have the highest frequency. Then check if who guesses the best after creating word clouds with the texts and getting the actual result.
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