Sunday 30 October 2011

British National Corpus

What is it?
British National Corpus (BNC) is an amazing concordance tool that consists of 100 million words of English written texts and spoken transcriptions, sampled from a comprehensive range of text types. In fact, it is one of the most important corpus in the field of linguistics. This tool is really great because it can be used to learn about aspects that we did not know about a particular word. We can also check our understanding about the word's meaning with the help from BNC. Moreover, BNC also provides several options, for instance, to know if a word can collocate with other set of words; and we can also check whether it is grammatically right in some specific context or not. To search for a word, we have to type the word or phrase in the search box. After that, the result will show up to 50 selected examples of the use of the word.

Suitable for:
I believe that this tool is suitable for secondary school and college/university students of all levels.

Activity Suggestions:
BNC can be used in the classroom for vocabulary enrichment among the students. Additionally, it will be a great help for the students to find the right collocation, especially to assist them in writing process.

The Link:
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/



Advantages:

1) It is absolutely free! No sign-up required, just type the words, and it will do the job straight away.

2) The example of the use of the words are authentic. It is good for the students since they can use it the their daily lives.

3) The students will be able to learn the correct use of words using this tool, thus it will be very beneficial for them, especially for their writing.


Disadvantages:

1) It is too complicated since a lot of features and options are offered.

2) The layout is too plain and it is too wordy as well. I guess it would not work in attracting the students.

3) There is no audio file available for each word. This means that the students could not be able to learn the correct pronunciation of the words.

While BNC serves as a great corpus tool, I think that it should only be used once in a while during the learning process since I am afraid that the students will get confused seeing too much information provided in BNC. However, it is still up to you - the decision is yours.

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