1. The document discusses how online corpora can be teachers' best friend by providing data on real language usage to answer questions about grammar, vocabulary, and language patterns.
2. It provides an overview of what a corpus is and examples of free online corpora teachers can use, such as COCA. It also demonstrates how to conduct corpus searches and analyses to solve linguistic problems.
3. The document cautions that corpus data requires careful interpretation and has limitations, but used properly, corpora are a valuable tool for language discovery in the classroom and for teachers' own professional learning.
6. training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk “ Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago… For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them…”
7. training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk “ intellectual abdication” “should be ashamed” “ current around 1900” “ a perversion of grammatical education” “ blind to textual evidence even when he himself exhibits it” “ dishonest and stupid” “ vile little compendium of tripe about style” Grammarian Geoffrey K Pullum on … “ More passives in Orwell's pompous essay with the warning about how you mustn't use them than in any periodical you can lay your hands on! “
8. This usage stuff is not straightforward and easy. If ever someone tells you that the rules of English grammar are simple and logical and you should just learn them and obey them, walk away, because you're getting advice from a fool. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2790
26. The Corpus Magic training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk * [ ] ? Different corpora use slightly different codes. Read the manual. [n* ]
27. The Corpus Magic training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk * [ ] ? Any one character Any number of characters (incl 0) Lemma (all inflectional forms of a word) Different corpora use slightly different codes. Read the manual. [n* ] Part of speech tags (e.g. nouns)
36. You can also training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk cats and dogs search for idioms ?each*s combine wildcards [=pretty] search for synonyms car|bike|horse search for alternatives used -car exclude searches For more details see:
48. Google as a Corpus Pros & Cons training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk PRO: rare, low frequency usage, uptodate usage CON: no sampling, no frequency sort, no genre limit, no part of speech tags
49. Google results counts are only rough estimates… training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk http://searchengineland.com/why-google-cant-count-results-properly-53559 Different people searching in different geographic locations can get different numbers Sometimes searching for A gives fewer results than searching for A without B
50. … but Google fights can be fun training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk
51. WebCorp is makes Google search results linguist-friendly training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk
52. Avoid Common Corpus Errors training.dyslexiaaction.org.uk Be aware of limitations : sampling, coverage, size, presence of typos and errors, bad part of speech tagging Beware of low frequency results Beware of homographs Check results come from multiple sources Check KWIC to confirm relevance Limit search by genre http://www.flickr.com/photos/andreassolberg/433734311