Module One Group Project Lexis and concordances

WHAT YOU DO Each person or group will find out about one pair or group of words. You will decide what the differences are between them (perhaps of lexico grammar or register or slight nuances in meaning). Create a worksheet that you could give to learners for self study. It should start with some short explanatory notes about the words, noting when and why you would choose to use them (and not the others) with some examples from real life language use. Then there should be an exercise (or two) that tests whether the learner has understood your explanations / the differences, then an answer key. If you use a small font the whole thing may fit on one page, or it might run to two. WHEN YOU DO IT This should all be uploaded by the next input sessions. There is a forum named concordance projects. Go to your topic and upload your worksheet as a reply to the relevant forum message HOW YOU DO IT You can look in usages and dictionaries, but the idea of the project is really to become more familiar with concordancers, so first try reading the three articles about this that I have put in the forum message (Read this before you do your projects). To do this it is a good idea to use a concordancing programme all these links are on the site. Most of them are in week 4. The concordancer on the compleat lexical tutor http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html type the word you are interested in into the empty box on the right of equal, then choose your corpus on the right and finally click on get concordance The British National Corpus at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ the only disadvantage of which is that it does not line up all the instances of the target word for you

You can also use Google (particularly if you are interested in comparing English and Turkish usage as there is no publicly accessible Turkish corpus as yet). Read the article about how to use Google as a concordancer on this weeks links first. And as ever you will need to liaise with your group as to how you can best combine your efforts. WHY YOU ARE DOING IT It is touched on in several different areas of the syllabus. It should give you a brief idea of some of the web based resources that are out there available to both teachers and students. You ought to be aware of the technique and then not only can you mention it if necessary in exam questions, but might see how it can be exploited with learners in your classroom too. It should help hone your skills of analysis, differentiation and definition, all of which will come in handy in several of the exam tasks.