DDL

Here are some of the ‘classic’ tools and links that will keep most of us EFL teachers interested in corpora and corpus-based approaches happy for a long time.  If you know of any more sites you wouldn’t want to be without, please let me know via the comment form below and I’ll add them here and credit you as the source.

Published corpora

  1. British National Corpus at http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
  2. American National Corpus http://www.americancorpus.org/
  3. TIME magazine archive at http://corpus.byu.edu/time/
  4. Collins Cobuild Bank of English at http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx (with a 10 step users’ guide at http://www.fi.muni.cz/~thomas/CCS/)
  5. Search the mother of all corpora…the world wide web at the advanced search page http://www.webcorp.org.uk/wcadvanced.html

Data-driven tools and appliances

  1. Tom Cobb’s Lextutor web site–one stop lexis research/analysis/application shopping at http://lextutor.ca
  2. Collins Cobuild collocations sampler at the bottom half of  http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx
  3. The graded reader is dead!  Long live the eReader at http://www.lexitronics.org/course/view.php?id=24 – a novel approach to developing breadth and depth of the essential lexis in the English language.
  4. The Web as a corpus – research in progress to keep in mind at http://webascorpus.org/
  5. A collocation profiler based on the BNC at http://193.133.140.102/JustTheWord/

NEAT TOOLS

  1. Let words/phrases fight it out at http://googlebattle.com
  2. Look for synonyms and related words at http://labs.google.com/sets
  3. Create word clouds based on frequency at http://wordle.net
  4. Students can use online concordances as they write at http://www.lextutor.ca/conc_writer/
  5. Some nice tools on readabilty at http://www.online-utility.org/english/index.jsp

RESOURCES

  1. David Lee’s corpora links at http://devoted.to/corpora
  2. Tom Cobb’s Lextutor web site at http://lextutor.ca and the lextutor NING at http://lextutor.ning.com
  3. New ways of looking at word lists at http://lexitronics.edublogs.org with MOODLE courses at http://lexitronics.org.
  4. A handbook on data-driven learning. and the home of the father of data-driven learning, Tim Johns.
  5. Some timeless advice on building quick and dirty corpora in EFL at http://www.ctribble.co.uk/text/Palc.htm
  6. Laurence Anthony’s software page for a free concordancer and a new version of Nation’s RANGE program at http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html

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