The document introduces several online tools and corpora that can be used to analyze English language usage, including the British National Corpus, the Flexible Language Acquisition Project, and the Compleat Lexical Tutor. It discusses how these resources can help with identifying collocations, derivatives, and register variation. Examples are provided of searching corpora to analyze the usage of words like "shall" and phrases containing verbs like "be disappointed."

1. 1
Writing with Open
Tools
(Part One)
09/11/2011 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikekline/265954619/ Alannah Fitzgerald

2. 2 Overview (part one)
Introducing Corpus Linguistics
Lexical knowledge: collocations, derivatives,
register
The Flexible Language Acquisition Project
(FLAX)
The British National Corpus (BNC)
The Lextutor
The Academic Wordlist (AWL)
EAP practice resources

3. Intro to corpus linguistics
Let‟s start with three questions about English:
1. What is the meaning of goalless?
2. How is the word shall used in present-day British
English? Think of some examples.
3. Which is more commonly expressed in everyday
English?
a. “I was a little disappointed…”
b. “I was very disappointed…”
Adapted from Hoffmann et al., 2008

4. British National Corpus
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

5. Focus on representation
The British National Corpus (BNC)
100 million-word static corpus 1978-1992
Spoken (10%); Written (90%); Domain representation

6. BNCweb concordancer – free download
http://bncweb.info/

7. BNC header information

8. http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax
?a=fp&sa=home

9. Focus on automation
The Flexible Language Acquisition Project
(FLAX)
Web n-gram corpora generated and supplied by 2006
Google web dump
500,000 words and 380 million five-grams
GALL - Google Assisted Language Learning
(Chinnery, 2008; Shei, 2008)

10. „Goalless‟ keyword search in FLAX
http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?

11. Distribution of shall I/we in the spoken component
of the BNC

12. Distribution of I/we shall in the spoken component
of the BNC

13. FLAX - Samples retrieved for I was a little
disappointed

14. BNC - Samples retrieved for I was a little
disappointed

15. BNC – Samples retrieved for I was very
disappointed
FLAX Web Collocations Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)

16. FLAX vs BNC?
• Limitations with representativeness
 Identifyingregister on the Web is difficult
 Successful corpora are based on
domains, genres, collections of document types
 The web is a “dirty corpus” Kilgariff & Grefenstette
(2003, p. 342)
 FLAX cleaned by 30% using BNC wordlist
 Linked externally to BNC, Yahoo
 Complementary sources, both with limitations

17. Google‟s terms of services
“You agree not to access (or attempt to access)
any of the Services by any means other than
through the interface that is provided by
Google, unless you have been specifically
allowed to do so in a separate agreement with
Google.”
http:www.google.com/accounts/TOS Clause 5.3

18. Typical lexical errors
18
telling
a. He‟s very humorous. He‟s always doing
jokes. collocation
conversed
b. We conversated for almost word families / derivatives
one hour.
without delay
c. …and compromise, the issue was resolved in
register
a jiffy.

19. http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax
?a=fp&sa=home

20. OSS Mozilla
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hindrik/2586245939/

21. 21 FLAX Web Pronoun Phrases Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)

22. Noticing Text Types – Issues of Register and
Genre
FLAX Web Pronoun Phrases Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)
22

23. FLAX Web Pronoun Phrases Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)
23

24. Web Pronouns Phrases OER
24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns4nXsZ

25. Kibbitzers (Tim John‟s EAP
25
pages)
http://www.lexically.net/TimJohns/Kibbitzer/timeap3.htm

26. Web Collocations (fact vs idea)
26
http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=g&rt=r&sa=CollocationSearch&s=CollocationTypes&s1.wordClass=n&c=c
ollodb&s1.query=&s1.multiple=on

27. Web Collocations (fact vs idea)
27

28. Compleat Lexical Tutor (Tom
Cobb)
http://www.lextutor.ca/

29. Web Collocations OER
http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/
29
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyZgZhHM

30. AWL Exercises (Nottingham)
30
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/index.htm

31. UEFAP (Andy Gillett)
31
http://www.uefap.com/index.htm

32. Specific EAP vocab (UEFAP)
32
http://www.uefap.com/vocab/vocfram.htm

33. FLAX User guides & demos
FLAX Web Collocations & Phrases Excercises (by Shaoqun Wu http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~shaoqun/tmp/instruction.html)

34. Speaking & Listening OER for
EAP
http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/crunch/

35. Web Phrases OER
35
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n67FBqBFm6I

36. 36 FLAX Web Phrases Collection Search (http://flax2.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=p&sa=home&module=)

37. 37 Preparation (part two)
• Samples of your own writing – soft copy
• Build your own corpus – collect ten
academic articles in your discipline
• Writing analysis tools
• Specific academic word lists