Berylaube 00's List: language tools

"What is the BNC?

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, both spoken and written. The latest edition is the BNC XML Edition, released in 2007.

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specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text. The spoken part (10%) consists of orthographic transcriptions of unscripted informal conversations (recorded by volunteers selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way) and spoken language collected in different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins."

Corpus of Historical American English (COHA; 1810-2009).

The corpus contains more than 425 million words of text and is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, &academic texts. It includes 20 million words each year from 1990-2011 & is also updated once or twice a year (the most recent texts are from March 2011). Because of its design, it is perhaps the only corpus of English that is suitable for looking at current, ongoing changes in the language (see the 2011 article in Literary and Linguistic Computing).

The interface allows you to search for exact words or phrases, wildcards, lemmas, part of speech, or any combinations of these. You can search for surrounding words (collocates) within a ten-word window (e.g. all nouns somewhere near faint, all adjectives near woman, or all verbs near feelings), which often gives you good insight into the meaning and use of a word.

The corpus also allows you to easily limit searches by frequency and compare the frequency of words, phrases, and grammatical constructions, in at least two main ways:

By genre: comparisons between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic, or even between sub-genres (or domains), such as movie scripts, sports magazines, newspaper editorial, or scientific journals

Over time: compare different years from 1990 to the present time

You can also easily carry out semantically-based queries of the corpus. For example, you can contrast and compare the collocates of two related words (little/small, democrats/republicans, men/women), to determine the difference in meaning or use between these words. the frequency and distribution of synonyms for nearly 60,000 words & compare their frequency in different genres, use these word lists as part of other queries. Finally, you can easily create your own lists of semantically-related words,

Acollaborative project with the aim of providing useful information for TEFL professionals."
TEFL Teaching: This area is all about teaching: how to teach and what to teach. And then how to make sure your students are learning! Included here are loads of activities and ideas for classroom control, discipline, techniques and so on
Skills:How to teach the four skills in English: listening, reading, speaking and writing.
Grammar Guide:=The TWW Grammar Guide is a comprehensive guide to English grammar written in a user-friendly manner for both learners and teachers.

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