CorpusLAB

CorpusLAB is a new FREE site for language learners and language teachers. CorpusLAB is designed to promote language learning based on real English used in different settings.

Students can use the site to take a variety of exercises created by teachers. Go to the Student pages and select a topic area (phrasal verbs, Academic English etc.). If you register, you will be able to keep track of your progress.

Teachers can use the site in different ways. The central engine of the site is a series of exercise authoring tools. The exercises, which include fill-the-gap, multiple-choice, matching, reorder, and categorise, are designed in a way that promotes the learning of collocations and phrasal patterns. For example, the matching exercise allows up to five columns of items rather than the usual two. One of the aims of the site is to build up resources for specialised English: Medical English, English for Tourism, and so on.

Another feature of the site is the sharing of corpus resources and corpus-informed materials such as wordlists, handouts, ppts, etc. In addition, teachers have access to a corpus of spoken professional English via a simple concordancer. A utility for the analysis of potential teaching texts is also under development.

March 24, 2008 The site has been redesigned. Some more programming is necessary to add an automatic exercise generating component. Some general guidelines and example exercises will also be added.

Feb 1st, 2008 The basics of the site are now online, but some changes in form and content will be made over the next month before the site is officially released. If you are a teacher, you are welcome to create exercises for your students.

CorpusLab for Other Languages. If you are interested in moderating a site for the teaching of Spanish, French etc., send an email to Michael Barlow (barlow@athel.com). The sites will start out as copies, more or less, of the English site and will then be transformed to suit each specific language.