BNL2709 – the essence of English

Ever wonder about which phrase or word is more commonly used? Let GOOGLEFIGHT sort it out for you.

See which is the most common: “keep a blog” or “have a blog”.

Neat, eh? Has some interesting applications with students.

NOTE: If you compare phrases that have different numbers of words, then you will need to put the phrases in quotes.  Thanks to Gavin Dudeney for this little gem.

The name sounds fancy, but really the concept is simple. Most corpora are monolingual, but with parallel corpora, the texts have been translated so when you search for a term in one language, you can see the way that word has been translated into the other language(s).

If you want to play around with this, the link is http://www.let.rug.nl/~tiedeman/OPUS/.

Here is an example of searching for the English word ‘honey’ in TURkish:

tur
220	tatlım
29	hayatım
17	canım
14	Tatlım
5	Hayatım
4	bal

Now, if you click on a number beside the term you are interested in, you will get a listing of the original English text with ‘HONEY’ and the translation of that text.  In this case, I clicked on ‘14′ to see how ‘Tatlim’ appeared with the English translations (from movie subtitles):

Also, if you click on any word in one of the foreign languages, you’ll see a list of the possible translations in English.  In this case, this is how Tatlim maps into English:

eng
220	honey
56	sweetheart
51	dear
51	sweetie
14	darling
8	baby
7	Honey
7	hon
2	now
2	Sweetheart

Tom Cobb’s Compleat Lexical Tutor site has got a wide range of tools that are indespensible aides to teaching. It has most everything you’ll need when it comes to data driven learning.

1. The BNL2709 vocabulary profiler is a great tool to use in conjunction with the BNL2709 book.
2. The Colour of Words blog has a series of short ’slidecasts’ that provide more information about vocabulary development using wordlists and vocabulary profiling.

The first tool to get to know is vocabulary profiling–how to look at the black and white world of words through a prism and see the colour of words according to the frequency of use.

1. Here is a short video on vocabulary profiling…it will open in a new window.
   It is about 2MB to download and lasts aout two and half minutes. You can stop, rewind and fast forward while you try out the techniques for yourself.

Students at METU.NCC now have a chance to take part in an innovative approach to vocabulary development by participating in the eReader community.

• The first twenty students to create accounts at the METU.NCC MOODLE at http://polaris.ncc.metu.edu.tr/moodle/ will be able to participate in the community for free.
• The course designers, John Eldridge, Senior Instructor at EMU and Steve Neufeld, former Instructor at METU.NCC, will be part of the community of eReaders, and will help and advise members of the community of learners.
• The course will be open for the month of May, and it will provide a great opportunity to practice skills and vocabulary knowledge for proficiency in English
• The deadline for creating accounts will be midnight, Sunday, 4th of May.
• An orientation to the eReader will be given on Monday afternoon at 15:00, 16:00 and 15:00 for students from different levels.
• Students who successfully complete the course will receive a certificate of participation.

The presentation outlines the project that is being undertaken at the Eastern Mediterranean University in applying a large-scale corpus-informed approach to develop a common university language framework.