One of the presentations of the AAACL 2006 conference, Oct 20-22, Flagstaff, AZ, Northern Arizona University.
Different riders, same workhorse
Using the Word Sketch Engine
with English language teachers,
teacher trainees and
post-graduate scientific researchers
James Thomas
Faculty of Informatics
Masaryk University
Czech Republic
This talk demonstrates how post-graduate students of computer science and under-graduate teacher trainees at Masaryk University (Czech Republic) are trained to use corpus tools and the uses they put them to. The former are regularly engaged in scientific writing while the latter are preparing teaching materials and correcting written work.
This work compares two very different groups of students at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic who consult the BNC via the Word Sketch Engine (WSE) in their quite different uses of English. As they are mostly quite competent non-native speakers, they have a reasonable knowledge of the language patterns and facts of English. However, when a choice has to be made, there is an immediate need for data which will reveal the constraints on their options.
The first group is a class of post-graduate students at the Faculty of Informatics (FI MU), who spend a considerable amount of time reading and writing in English. For example, while writing they regularly search for the collocations and colligations of words. During their English lessons, we often project search results for group discussion. They also have tasks to find illustrative sentences and submit them to the glossary tool in Moodle. Criteria for such sentences have been developed and made available through this LMS. Their sentences are then used to make worksheets, interactive exercises and even voice recordings – depending on the purpose.
As the BNC does not meet their needs for computer science terminology, we are creating an Informatics Corpus. Using Corpus Builder (CB), a tool developed at FI MU, they submit articles from their sub-fields, indicate the subfield using the ACM classification, and then the CB tags and lemmatizes them. Just this morning I was greeted with an email from a student who uploaded 800,000 words at the weekend!
The second group is a class of teacher trainees at the Faculty of Education. They attend Discovering English, which trains them in using the WSE for the BNC and introduces some other web-based tools such VIEW, Cobuild, the Compleat Lexical Tutor and WebBootCaT. They create worksheets using illustrative sentences, consult the corpus when correcting students’ written work, and create their own corpora using WebBootCaT for standard language teaching topics.
Links (in order of the abstract)
Faculty of Informatics http://www.fi.muni.cz/
BNC http://corpora.fi.muni.cz/bnc/doc/urg.html
Word Sketch Engine http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/sampler/
Moodle http://moodle.org/
Corpus Builder http://corpora/cb/
The ACM Computing
Classification System http://www.acm.org/class/1998/
Faculty of Education http://www.muni.cz/edu/
VIEW http://view.byu.edu/
Cobuild Corpus Concordance
Sampler http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx
Compleat Lexical Tutor http://132.208.224.131/
WebBootCaT http://corpora.fi.muni.cz/bootcat/
Different riders, same workhorse
Using the Word Sketch Engine
with English language teachers,
teacher trainees and
post-graduate scientific researchers
James Thomas
Faculty of Informatics
Masaryk University
Czech Republic
This talk demonstrates how post-graduate students of computer science and under-graduate teacher trainees at Masaryk University (Czech Republic) are trained to use corpus tools and the uses they put them to. The former are regularly engaged in scientific writing while the latter are preparing teaching materials and correcting written work.
This work compares two very different groups of students at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic who consult the BNC via the Word Sketch Engine (WSE) in their quite different uses of English. As they are mostly quite competent non-native speakers, they have a reasonable knowledge of the language patterns and facts of English. However, when a choice has to be made, there is an immediate need for data which will reveal the constraints on their options.
The first group is a class of post-graduate students at the Faculty of Informatics (FI MU), who spend a considerable amount of time reading and writing in English. For example, while writing they regularly search for the collocations and colligations of words. During their English lessons, we often project search results for group discussion. They also have tasks to find illustrative sentences and submit them to the glossary tool in Moodle. Criteria for such sentences have been developed and made available through this LMS. Their sentences are then used to make worksheets, interactive exercises and even voice recordings – depending on the purpose.
As the BNC does not meet their needs for computer science terminology, we are creating an Informatics Corpus. Using Corpus Builder (CB), a tool developed at FI MU, they submit articles from their sub-fields, indicate the subfield using the ACM classification, and then the CB tags and lemmatizes them. Just this morning I was greeted with an email from a student who uploaded 800,000 words at the weekend!
The second group is a class of teacher trainees at the Faculty of Education. They attend Discovering English, which trains them in using the WSE for the BNC and introduces some other web-based tools such VIEW, Cobuild, the Compleat Lexical Tutor and WebBootCaT. They create worksheets using illustrative sentences, consult the corpus when correcting students’ written work, and create their own corpora using WebBootCaT for standard language teaching topics.
Links (in order of the abstract)
Faculty of Informatics http://www.fi.muni.cz/
BNC http://corpora.fi.muni.cz/bnc/doc/urg.html
Word Sketch Engine http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/sampler/
Moodle http://moodle.org/
Corpus Builder http://corpora/cb/
The ACM Computing
Classification System http://www.acm.org/class/1998/
Faculty of Education http://www.muni.cz/edu/
VIEW http://view.byu.edu/
Cobuild Corpus Concordance
Sampler http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx
Compleat Lexical Tutor http://132.208.224.131/
WebBootCaT http://corpora.fi.muni.cz/bootcat/