Lexitronics

Steve says to Yongyang:

…I was reflecting on the portfolio tasks and the idea that John first floated by me of having students create an ‘i-corpus’ of their own work.  Learner corpora are quite common these days.  However,  I haven’t come across the idea of individual corpora kept and used by each student as a record of their own personal language development. Have you?  Just as an example, I’ve attached a sample of one of my students’ portfolio tasks to give you a flavour of the standard of English.

Now, combining John’s idea of the i-corpus with your idea of a reference corpus starts to make sense to me as a very practical way to help ELT teachers-in-training (or in-service) whose first language isn’t English analyze and improve their own level of English.  The thread that binds both would be common words in English, and an analysis of frequency would yield the common words that have special significance in ELT, plus the offlist words that define the ESPishness of ELT.

I’ll pursue that a bit, perhaps by building up a reference corpus of some of the classic ELT texts on methodology to being with, and see if anything emerges that has potential.

And John says – there look like two very profitable lines of enquiry there… and two articles!

Don’t know how this will work – but I just wanted to put some references to sites that may help those interested in using NING for educational purposes:

Ning in Education – Using Ning for Educational Social Networks

A community of educators using Ning to build social networks.
education.ning.com/

Lexitronics meets Teacher Development in Nilgun, John and Steve’s presentation at METU today:

Interesting discussion about pre-teaching vocabulary on Lindsay Clandfield’s BLOG at: http://sixthings.net/2009/06/05/adrian-tennants-six-acts-of-sheep-in-elt/

Scroll down and you’ll see mention of John and Nilgun’s ELTJ article about texts and frequency lists mentioned in Scott Thornbury’s case for the defence.. 

Here’s a ’spelling’ wordlist written for elementary level learners, which might be worth taking a closer look at from an ESL perspective:

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/22366