Corpora and Concordancing

-Corpora and Concordancing

It is based on the study of real life language.

Some definitions:
- A corpus: set of texts put together for some purpose
- A concordance: list of examples of a particular word, part of a word or combination of words, in its contexts drawn from a text corpus.
- Collocations: statements of the habitual places of that word.
- Colligation: grammatical company a word keeps and the position it prefers.
- Semantic prosody: many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment (example: "happen" is usually for unpleasant things)

With intermediate students, you should pick a corpora of easier texts.

Advantages:
- they favour discovery learning
- they do it with examples of authentic language
- it is motivating

This is freeware and it is the one the teacher recommends us to use:
http://www.edict.com.hk/pub/concapp


Another recommendation: have a look at the corpora that is already available on the web.
wHong Kong Virtual Language Centre http://www.edict.com.hk/concordance/default.htm
wBritish National Corpus (corpus demo) http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/
wCobuild Bank of English (wordbanks online) http://www.cobuild.collins.co.uk/
wCorpus Concordance Sampler http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx

Wordsmith Tools
It is not a free one, but it is quite a good one. It has got a word list and concord.

It costs 50 dollars for each computer that uses it.

Once you have bought it you have to get the "corpora" (from a CD-Rom for example). If you have no more money to spend, you can go to the "British National Sampler" for example.

How to use it:
- In "file", choose texts (get them from the CD)
- Then, ALL,
- Then, OK
- After that, in "concord" (settings, search word), press the green botton

WORKING WITH HONG KONG VIRTUAL CENTER
It is free, son it doesn't have too many options.
How it works:
- Go to "English. Simple search"
- Search string: It is the search word. It can be one word (ex. "get") or two ("get up"). It can be an ending or a start, or a word containing somthing.
- Normal: It searchs words down the middle of the page
- Gapped: fill in the blanks
- Sort type: you can sort words alphabetically on the right, on the left, in a random way... (after the word)
- Stop after - we will write default there because there aren't usually too many examples
- Select corpus: brown corpus: American English; LOB corpus: British English