The prime machine: A new learner-centred corpus application as a language reference and learning tool for students

Presenter: Stephen Jeaco (English, Culture and Communication)

Key words: Prime machine, Learner-centred software application, Language reference and learning tool

While corpora play an important role in lexicography, language descriptions, and in published materials development, corpus software is generally difficult to use and can easily overwhelm students and teachers.  For his doctoral research, the presenter developed a new software tool which draws together examples from a variety of sources and displays information about the context and patterning in a way which has been specifically designed for language learning.  It provides real examples and linguistic information in a highly intuitive form.  As well as traditional KWIC, it has “Cards” which show results with sentences before and after the search term with paragraphing. It displays collocations in full, and has visual cues and evidence for a range of statistical measures for typical contextual environments.

The TDF aims to make the fruits of this work available to students and tutors, and to explore student use and attitudes in a longer term study. This presentation will introduce some of the main features of the software, including support for making queries, comparing words and phrases and exploring the results. It will also outline some of the ways in which evaluation of this tool is now ongoing, and how it is hoped the concordancer will become a useful writing tool for EAP and independent study. The software has recently been made available and can be accessed through the XJTLU network.  

* This is a Teaching Development Fund project