Using Corpora in TEFL By Terri Yueh

WhyWhy Work With Corpora? Why  From Vocabulary to Corpus  Choosing a Corpus Choosing a Corpus  Examples of Word Lists and Concordances Examples of Word Lists and Concordances  Collocations & Concordance Collocations Concordance  Corpus-informed approach Corpus-informed approach

The Ages of Corpus Lexicography  The four ages The four ages Magazine/February2006/35-Corpora-Tips.htm  Word sketching Word sketching

 The Brown Corpus of Standard American English was the first of the modern, computer readable, general corpora. It was compiled by W.N. Francis and H. Kucera, Brown University, Providence, RI.  The corpus consists of 1,000,000 words of American English texts printed in The texts for the corpus were sampled from 15 different text categories to make the corpus a good standard reference.  Much of its usefulness lies in the fact that the Brown corpus lay-out has been copied by other corpus compilers. The LOB corpus (British English) and the Kolhapur Corpus (Indian English) are two examples of corpora made to match the Brown corpus. The availability of corpora which are so similar in structure is a valuable resourse for researchers interested in comparing different language varieties, for example.

 URL:  The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century.  The BNC World Edition contains 4,054 texts and occupies 1,508,392 Kbytes, or about 1.5 Gb. The written part of the BNC (90%) includes, for example, extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays. The spoken part (10%) includes a large amount of unscripted informal conversation, recorded by volunteers selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way, together with spoken language collected in all kinds of different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins.

More Free Corpus Websites  Virtual Language Centre (Hong Kong) Virtual Language Centre Web Concordancer & Net Dictionary ConcordancerNet Dictionary  VIEW: VARIATION IN ENGLISH WORDS AND PHRASES  VOA's Special English Program Scripts VOA's Special English Program Scripts  Corpora Collections

References  黃希敏,“ 語料語言學概述,” 敦煌英語教學電子雜誌, Nov. 2004, 語料語言學概述  黃希敏,“ 語料語言學研究面面觀,” 敦煌英語教學電子雜誌, March 2005, 語料語言學研究面面觀  The Use of Corpora in Language Studies The Use of Corpora in Language Studies  NTNU Virtual Language Center NTNU Virtual Language Center 師大英語搭配線上檢索系統 NTNU Concordancer and Collocation Retrieval System