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This blog is mainly created for my learning reflection on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in English Language Teaching (ELT). However, I welcome all readers especially teachers and teacher trainees who wish to use new technology in the classroom in order to get the most out of their students. I hope this page can inspire teachers to try out new ideas, building up their knowledge, and improving their classroom abilities. Welcome and enjoy!

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

When Concordancer Becomes A Helper

A concordancer is a piece of software that can be used to search, access and analyse language from corpus. It useful n exploring the relationships between words and can give us very accurate information about the way language is authentically used. By using concordance, the language users will have no more self doubt with which collocation is correct. One of the tools that functions as a concordancer is Just The Word.




General Description

Just The Word is a collocation thesaurus concordancer. Based on the British National Corpus (BNC), Just The Word allows users to study word clusters in combination with their grammatical functions (colligations), through the advantage of combining the functions of a thesaurus and a dictionary. By clicking on the given collocation, it gives users examples of how it is used from BNC. The great thing about this concordance is that it allows users to transform the presentation of the collocations into a word cloud through Wordle. To get started, simply go to the website. Then, just type in a word and search either for its alternatives or word combinations. By clicking on the word ‘combinations’ option, it produces a great list of collocations from the word. If the users click on the collocates, they will get a list of colligations (the grammatical functions of the collocations) with the expressions highlighted in context. Additionally, if the users click on ‘View in Wordle’, the site will link through automatically to Wordle and create a word cloud of the most frequent collocations for the key word. Furthermore, there is a button for ‘learner errors’ which can be used to search for common learner errors in using the collocations. The following screenshot shows an example of collocations from the word technology.



Below is an example of colligations from one of the word combination above:



And this is an example for the word collocations that are viewed using the Wordle:



Level and Age

Just The Word is suitable to be applied for students at upper intermediate level and above. This is because word collocation is a difficult content, and students at beginner level might find it difficult to understand those relations between words without careful explanation from teachers. Hence, the tool is applicable for secondary school students at the age of 15-17 years old and adult learners to use for developing a better understanding of the word collocations.

How To Use Just The Word For Teaching English?

This web tool can be used as follows (Peachy, 2011):
  1. Grammar practice: Teacher creates gapped sentences using the contextualized results from the concordance, and then creates a Wordle for students to select the answers from. 
  2. Writing activity: Teacher creates collocation Wordles and gets students to try to make sentences with the word combinations.
  3. Self-evaluation: Instead of correcting students’ common collocation errors, teacher can get students to check the collocations in their writing and discover themselves what the errors were. 
  4. Exploring collocation: After introducing students with new words, teacher can ask students to use the tool to see if they can find other words that are commonly used with the new words learned. Besides, teacher can get students to research the context in which different collocations would be used.
  5. Independent learning: Teacher can encourage students to use the tool to research words and collocations.
Evaluation

Advantages:
  1. Just The Word allows students to have an access to corpora of authentic language that can help them to check or reconfirm about the way that language is used. Therefore, students will have deeper understanding about the word collocations. 
  2. Besides, it helps both teachers and students to check the uses and collocations of words are the most frequent, up to date, and correct.
  3. Moreover, it helps students to find authentic examples to be used in their writing and speaking. 
  4. This tool also assists students to learn the use of collocations in context through the genuine examples given.
  5. This tool also facilitates students’ independent learning as they can use the tool independently whenever they need it.
Disadvantages:
  1. Just The Word can only be used with the access to the internet and cannot be downloaded to the computer. Thus, this will give problems if students cannot get access to the internet.
Reference:
Peachy, N., (2011). A Collocation Thesaurus Concordancer That Produces Word Clouds. Nik’s Quickshout. [blog] 14 November. <Available at: http://quickshout.blogspot.com/> [Accessed 15 November 2011].

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