Okayama JALT July Meeting Report

Post date: Jul 24, 2012 5:30:32 AM

Reported by Scott Gardner

An Online Corpus Workshop by Ted O’Neill

Utilizing an e-learning center on the campus of a local university, O’Neill gave a clear, hands-on, from-the-basics explanation of some online resources for lexical analysis of texts. Focusing mainly on Tom Cobb’s Compleat Lexical Tutor site, O’Neill showed how to check word frequency in a given text, and how to test a text’s word usage against standard frequency models of English (for L2 learning purposes). These online tools can be used to make cloze tests, to create appropriate ER materials, or to ensure repeated exposure to vocabulary by comparing word frequencies across several texts. O’Neill finished the session by introducing some other online lexis analyzers such as COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) and Phraseup, a simple concordance students can use to check whether their usage matches what is most commonly found in English writing on the Internet.