Essential lexical tools

This section is currently being rewritten (12 October 2024)

Photo by eltpics

Here you will find a list of online resources that I personally find useful when teaching lexis and I think would be a nice addition to your toolkit. While there are many tools on the web that (claim to) help learners with vocabulary, they often focus on single words. The tools listed below can help learners (and teachers) with collocations, chunks and patterns, in other words - lexis, and build up students’ phrasal lexicon – this is what this blog is about, isn’t it?

All of these tools can be also found in my Scoop.it magazine - click HERE. Or watch the recording of my VRT6 webinar where I present most of these tools - click HERE

Table of contents (click and to jump to the section)

Corpus-lite tools (Just-the-Word, Netspeak etc.)
Online learner's dictionaries (Cambridge, Macmillan etc.)
Corpus and concordancers (BNC, COCA etc.)
Recording and practising lexis (Quizlet, Diigo etc.)
Text tools (Vocab profiler, Concordle)

Corpus-'lite' tools

With all my love and respect for the corpus, it is admittedly not for everyone. If you are less linguistically minded but would still like to take advantage of online linguistic corpora and what they have to offer for the classroom, there are a number of corpus-derived tools which some may find more user-friendly.

Collocations

Teaching a new word? Don’t forget to provide a couple of its common collocations. You can find a number of online tools to look up collocations, for example http://5yiso.appspot.com or www.ozdic.com (both based on Oxford Collocations Dictionary) or For Better English http://forbetterenglish.com. Key in a word and see its common collocations with example sentences.

Just-the-word

www.just-the-word.com 

This easy-to-use visualisation application is my favourite collocations tool because it enables you to look up multi-part verbs as well (unlike the other two mentioned above). The frequency of each collocation is illustrated by a green bar - the longer the bar, the more frequent the collocation. Clicking on the chosen collocation brings up concordance lines illustrating how it is used in context.

For ideas on how to help your students build their collocational knowledge using just-the-word, see my activity on the TeachingEnglish website: Playing with Lexical Cards

Oxford Collocation Dictionary - Note: pirated 

http://ozdic.com/
I am less impressed with this one. It works well for verb + noun collocations but, for some reason, if you want to look up an adjective you only get its verb and adverb partners but not noun collocates. When I tried searching for "rough" I get breakrough and borough but not rough (?)

HASK collocation browser - NEW!

http://pelcra.pl/hask_en/browser

Another visualisation tool that illustrates frequency distribution for collocations of a given word, which looks like this:

You enter a word, click on Search and then choose which part of speech you want collocates to be. For example, to get to the above you need to choose from the list:

AJ% collocating with N%s

which I find a bit confusing. AJ% here means you're interested in "regular" as an adjective (because it can also be a noun as in "He's a regular in this club") and N%s means you're looking for nouns that collocate with it. After you've made the choice, just click on Visualisation on the right and get a colourful pie chart like the one above. The other option is an Excel spreadsheet which, I am sure, can be used to create various classroom exercises but I still need to come up with something.

Thank you to Scott Thornbury for pointing out HASK to me!

SkELL - Sketch Engine

https://skell.sketchengine.eu

Formerly known as forbtetterenglish.com, SkELL stays trus to its mission - helping learners improve their English. It's essentially a simplified version of the highly respected Sketch Engine, designed with language learners in mind. Although I've placed here, under the Collocation section, SkELL actually offers more. It consists of three pages / tools: Examples, Word Sketch and Similar Words.

The Examples tool retrieves example sentences from Sketch Engine's own corpus while Similar Words is, well, a thesaurus. But let's briefly focus on Word Sketch. As the name suggests, this tool sketches out a word's natural environment. Learners may need some guidance as to objects, subjects and modifiers before they can start exploring collocations themselves. As the authors state in the mini manual, "collocations cannot be guessed, they must be learnt". The author of this blog couldn't agree more!

Chunks and phrases

Phraseup*

www.phraseup.com

Know what you want to say but can’t find the right word? This writing assistant suggests several possible combinations to fill in the words you can’t remember. A useful tool for students to use when writing.

Netspeak

www.netspeak.org

Similar to phraseup* in that it helps find missing words, Netspeak will suggest the most common combinations organised by frequency. By clicking on the plus sign you can view example sentences from Google.

For ideas on how to use this tool in class, click here

Fraze.it

http://fraze.it

Another search engine for phrases and sentences on the Internet which comes with an auto-complete function. Most of the sentences come from top news websites.

Phraseup*, Fraze.it or Netspeak? The advantage of Netspeak is that it provides most statistically likely combinations, which can not only help students with writing but also check their intuitions about the commonness of certain phrases. This advantage, however, is at the same time its limitation: it will only show statistically frequent combinations. Phraseup*, on the other hand, will yield more results. Unlike the other two, Fraze.it allows you to filter the example sentences by form (interrogative or negative sentences) or position so you can see, for example, if a particular phrase is more likely to occur at the beginning or the end of a sentence. Which tool is better? The jury is still out…

Lexico-grammatical patterns

StringNet
http://nav.stringnet.org
Another tool based on BNC. However it is different from - or, as its creators claim, is much more than just - a corpus. It is an archive of multiword patterns that have been statistically derived from a corpus. Unlike the tools described above, Stringnet makes it possible to easily navigate from one pattern to other related patterns. All the words in the results are clickable allowing you to look up other words that fit the pattern, particurarly useful for semi-fixed expressions with variable slots. It may not be as user-friendly as other tools but its definite plus is the fact that it focuses on both syntagmaticand paradigmatic word relationships.

Patterns with the word 'emphasis'

Other adjectives that can precede 'emphasis' in "place great emphasis on"

Online learner’s dictionaries

The three dictionaries below are all based on corpora and, unlike other online dictionaries (e.g. www.dictionary.com) are compiled with the needs of language learners in mind. They provide authentic, corpus-derived examples and therefore an essential tool for learners and teachers alike.

Cambridge Dictionaries Online

http://dictionary.cambridge.org

This was the first learner’s dictionary to offer a free online version and is still my favourite.  It provides very natural examples drawn from corpora, highlighting common collocations and useful patterns. The former Advanced Learner’s Dictionary now comes in two versions: British English and American English and if the level is too high for learners they can easily switch to the Learner’s Dictionary using the drop-down menu.

Macmillan Dictionary - discontinued

www.macmillandictionary.com

Based on the fairly recent and well-balanced World English Corpus, this dictionary is easy to navigate. Unlike the Cambridge Dictionary you don’t have go to a different page for a different sense of the same word; all the senses of the word are listed on the same page. Occasional collocation boxes are a valuable addition and a definite plus.

The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

www.ldoceonline.com

Another corpus-based dictionary but not as good as its paper version. Unlike the other two, LDOCE doesn’t allow you to search multi-word units. For example, if you want to look up a phrase (e.g. cut some slack) or a multi-part verb (cut down on), you have to look up the key word (cut) and then scroll down until you find the desired item. A useful feature is word frequency. S1, S2 or S3 indicate whether the word is one of the 1000, 2000 or 3000 most commonly spoken words. W1, W2 and W3 are the same symbols for written English

Oxford Learner's Dictionaries

www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com

For many decades, since its first publication in 1948, the OALD (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary) was the only dictionary catering to learners of English. Its online version is still a standout resource. If Longman or Cambridge give two-three examples for each entry, here you get five. And if you scroll down and click on Extra examples, it brings up another 10-15- all the examples you need to supply when presenting new vocabulary in class! Other interesting features include Word Origin - for etymology lovers, and Wordfinder which lists items related to a particular topic - great for writing essays!

Corpus and concordances

Concordancer

www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html

Concordancer is a tool that extracts linguistic data from a corpus. You enter a word and get examples of how it is used, known as concordances or concordance lines. These are usually listed alphabetically.

See this article by Nik Peachey on the TeachingEnglish website: Concordancers in ELT

NB: some links may be out of date

British National Corpus (BNC)
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc

Before various corpus-based tools became widely available, the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) were my main sources of collocations and other linguistic information. They may seem a bit complicated but they combine all the functions described above: frequencies, collocations, common patterns. Another advantage is the Compare function which helps you compare how two synonymous or confusable words are used. Unfortunately this comparison cannot be performed on multi-part verbs vs their one word equivalents (e.g. look up to / admire) as both search phrases have to have the same number of words.

This is a handout I designed for teacher trainees a few years ago explaining some basic functions.

Using the Corpus

CorpusMate - updated on 12/10/2024

https://corpusmate.com/info

A new arrival on the scene, CorpusMate comes from the same brilliant minds behind SkELL (see abvoe). Designed specifically for younger L2 learners, this tool makes language data exploration simpler and more engaging. It incorporates some of the best features from existing tools, including the popular KWIC (Kew Word In Context) view. Hide KWIC is a cool addition. CorpusMate draws on multiple publicly available written and spoken corpora across 20 different subjects, making it a comprehensive tool for both students and teachers.

Recording and practising lexis

Quizlet
http://quizlet.com

Originally conceived mainly for word cards, this online flash card maker, if used creatively, is also great for collocations and lexical chunks. You can easily print your sets, cut them up and use them for matching activities in class. And it keeps getting better and better. You can now add your own voice to your cards, if you don't like the robotic voice provided by the website. It is so good I just pray it won't go from free to fee.

See detailed instructions on how you and your students can use this wonderful tool HERE:
Check out one of the sets of collocation cards I've created: http://quizlet.com/_7m9ia
Or this set with lexical chunks (and their L1 equivalents): http://quizlet.com/_ftkj1
And then try these games:
Scatter
Space race

Diigo
www.diigo.com
Diigo is an online bookmarking tool which saves all your bookmarks online and lets you access them from anywhere, using any browser. You can also highlight any part of a webpage which makes Diigo a perfect tool for highlighting lexical chunks in online articles and texts and then sharing them with your students.

To find out more about using Diigo in class - see my post here


Text tools 
Vocab Profiler
www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng
Research shows that 95%- 98% lexical coverage is needed for adequate comprehension of a text, i.e you need to know a minimum of 95% (Laufer 1989) and optimally 98% (Nation 2001) of all running words in a text to be able to understand a text. Vocab Profiler allows you to analyse a text by sorting all the words in it into the first and second thousand levels (K1, K2), academic words (AWL) and off-list. Copy-paste the text  and click on the SUBMIT button. All the "difficult" (beyond the first two thousand most frequent words) will be highlighted in red. You can eliminate all proper names and run the Vocab Profiler again. Now you've chosen a text appropriate to your students' level. But hold on, what IS your students' level? Lextutor has a variety of tests to test your students' vocabulary knowledge - both receptive and productive. A recent addition is a Phrase test, based on Martinez's (2001) pioneering research on the most frequent lexical chunks in English.

A very comprehensive guide to VocabProfiler and other tools hosted on the Lextutor website can be found here


Concordle - not so pretty cousin of Wordle
http://folk.uib.no/nfylk/concordle
You're familiar with Worlde, right? It's a tool (actually now there are a few of them around) that creates funnily-shaped word clouds based on the words in a text. Its not so pretty cousin can also create word clouds which, though not as charming as Wordle cloud, serve more functions. Every word is clickable and clicking on a word brings up concordances (lines from the text where the word appears in context). Based on these concordances you can point out different collocations of a recurrent word or useful patterns with a word which appear in a text.


More to come: 
Google Books Ngram Viewer, Wordcount and other tools