Kevin will present a number of free and readily accessible tools which will enable you to become more independent and improve your English language skills without having to have a teacher or attend class. These linguistic tools will be of particular interest to advanced learners and language teachers.
The first tools presented are those commonly used in what is called Corpus Linguistics. In this field, language databanks are analysed for various purposes. The tools these linguists use are readily available online, quite easy to use, and can be of great use to both learners and teachers.
Classes will involve both a great deal of group discussion and the participation of students in autonomous practical activities. These activities will be interspersed with brief presentations. Reference materials will be provided free of charge
Here is a possible outline for classes:
Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. What is a corpus? What is the main reason for using corpora? What is corpus annotation? What is a specialised corpus? Corpora and language learning.
Corpora and language learning. What is a concordance? What is collocation? What is a frequency distribution in a corpus? Why study them?
Introduction to corpus browsing software and various corpora. A practical Introduction focusing on collocation.
Two autonomous practical activities, followed by reflection and group discussion. Building wordlists, geographical variations and different genres of English.
Building your own corpus. Exploring corpora. A class tailored to your personal needs as an advanced language learner. Tagging.
Using corpora to help you improve your awareness of spoken language. Male and female speech, influences of gender and class on spoken language, differences between spoken and written form.
An introduction to lexical bundles or chunks. Activity and discussion.
Final Discussion: Can Corpus Linguistics help you learn English? Traditional and contemporary approaches to language learning, learner corpora, dictionaries, error correction and data-driven learning.
Further details are available here.
If interested, please get in touch.
info (@) creativelanguagelab.com