Some useful website from CALL-2

*the article--Corpus Linguistics: What It Is and How It Can Be Applied to Teaching by Daniel Krieger.
*A collection of texts, spoken and/or written, which has been designed and compiled based on a set of clearly defined criteria. (e.g. British National Corpus, BNC Spoken Corpus , Brown Corpus)
*Corpora (that's the plural of corpus) are now used by many people involved in language teaching. All of the modern learners' dictionaries are based on corpora. People who study grammar and how best to teach it use corpora to discover new grammar principles NOT found in older grammar books. e.g. Cambridge International Corpus (Cambridge Online Dictionary).


Examples of English language corpora
The Bank of English – written and spoken English (used extensively by researchers and for the COBUILD series of English language books)
The BNC – written and spoken British English (used extensively by researchers and for the Oxford University Press, Chambers and Longman publishing houses)

Concordancer

A concordancer is a kind of search engine designed for language study. If you enter a word, it looks through a large body of texts, called a corpus, and lists every single example of the word.
This lets you look at a word in context, see how common it is, and see the style associated with it. Such a tool is a computer-specific tool that you may not be familiar with from learning English by more traditional ways, but it is worth spending some time experimenting with it and getting to know how to use it.
In addition to showing you a clear and objective picture of language use, concordancer can help you with words that you are unsure of. You can use it to compare your usage with that of native speakers.Further reading at http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/concordancers.html


Monolingual online concordancers

1. VLC Concordancerhttp://vlc.polyu.edu.hk2. NTNU Web Concordancerhttp://llrc.eng.ntnu.edu.tw/English/search/default.htm developed by Dr. Howard Chen.3. Online Concordancer by Dr. Tom Cobbhttp://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/


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Bilingual online concordancers

Parallel corpus--A parallel corpus is a collection of texts, each of which is translated into one or more other languages than the original.

CANDLE- National E-Learning Project (計畫主持人: 清華大學劉顯親教授)http://candle.cs.nthu.edu.tw/newcandle/Home_C.asp

TOTALRECALL—A bilingual concordancer http://candle.cs.nthu.edu.tw/totalrecall/totalrecall/totalrecall.aspx?funcID=1


Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Grammar

A. Descriptive GrammarA descriptive grammar looks at the way a language is actually used by its speakers and then attempts to analyse it and formulate rules about the structure. Descriptive grammar does not deal with what is good or bad language use; forms and structures that might not be used by speakers of Standard English would be regarded as valid and included. It is a grammar based on the way a language actually is and not how someone think it should be.
B. Prescriptive GrammarA prescriptive grammar lays out rules about the structure of a language. Unlike a descriptive grammar, it deals with what the grammarian believes to be right and wrong, good or bad language use; not following the rules will generate incorrect language. Both types of grammar have their supporters and their detractors, which in all probability suggests that both have their strengths and weaknesses. from UsingEnglish.Com


What is collocation?

1. In English, certain words are often used together (co-occur).
2. Collocation refers to the restrictions on how words can be used together, for example which prepositions are used with particular verbs, or which verbs and nouns are used together.
3. Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language. A grammatically correct sentence will stand out as 'awkward' if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation an interesting area for language teaching and learning.
For example:
make an appointment
make a mistake
make a dicisionbut,

do an exercise
do your homework
do the research


Types of collocation

1. Verb + NounV + the survey (做問卷調查)V + a studyV + difficulties2. Adjective + Noun Adj + probability (很高的可能性, 機會很大)There is __________ probability that price growth will remain.Tthere is a __________ chance that President Bush will take a new direction on Iraq. 3. Adverb + Verbstrongly + suggest4. Adverb + Adjectivetotally different very differentslightly different5. Adjective + Prepositionblamed forhappy abouthappy with


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Collocation retrieval systems

1.NTNU Concordancer and Collocation Retrieval System (CCRS) http://140.122.83.246/cwb/A monolingual collocation retrival system developed by Dr. Howard Chen from NTNU.

2. Tango Verb-Noun Collocation http://candle.cs.nthu.edu.tw/collocation/webform2.aspx?funcID=9deveoped by Dr. 劉顯親 from 清華大學 .


Google operators
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861