This page collects some tools that I think are useful.
Corpora are collections of huge amounts of language. The corpora I use to teach English are:
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COCA- the granddaddy of corpora. I'm not going to make any apologies for the UI, but COCA is a huge base that supports many tools for customization, like part-of-speech tagging and regex. I give a demonstration of how I recently used it below.
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Youglish─ Youglish finds instances of words occurring in Youtube videos. They state youglish is about pronunciation, but really it gives all kinds of interesting contextual information: like the relative word frequency, and formality. Sometimes I use it just to find contexts of where an unusual word or phrase is used-
If you search for a word or expression on a good corpus, you'll find lots of helpful context information. For example, you'll find how frequently words occur, or collocate, with others words. Handling collocations well are one of the keys to really advanced speech.
Here's an example of how a student and I recently used a corpus. He asked me
about the times when the preposition "to" is followed by an -ing form of the verb. As in
I look forward to meeting you
I told him that forward to was a rare exception. Then I realized I was doing the worst thing a teacher could do: bullshitting. I really had no idea when "-ing" follows "to," but I knew how I could check.
We went to the Coca corpus and did a quick search using wild card expansion for
to *ing. There were some false hits, like to bring so I searched again
using the "verb" part of speech to [v?g*]
Here we found many collocations, ordered by most frequent. Some examples, using "going."
- [when it]comes to going
- forward to going
- prior to going
- [in] addition to going
So both teacher and student used the corpus to get what they need: he got a list of common collocations, which he could memorize using Anki, and I found out that its better check the data than to bullshit. I also realized that "to+ing" occurs whenever the "ing" could be replaced by common noun. E.g. "Prior to the crime," "when it comes to the crime," and "I look forward to the crime."
- Slova A very useful site that counts the number of times a word occurs in a text or on a youtube video. When unknown words appear more frequently in a text, you know they're probably more important to learn. You can save your words and export them, which makes it perfect to use in conjunction with Spaced repetition.
Anyone who's read in a foreign language will tell you that sometimes its just not practical to look up every unfamiliar word. However, if a word occurs frequently, a reader probably does want to learn it. The best approach, used by many teachers, is to "pre-teach" important words.
Unfortunately, though, it's impossible to pre-teach yourself. This site helps with that. I personally use Slova often for Spanish.
- Anki. What I personally use. There are many others, like mnemosyne.
Language learning is a field where a certain amount of brute memorization is actually necessary. Spaced Repetition is a proven tool to improve long term recall of information.
Besides vocabulary, spaced repetition is very usefol for memorizing collocations and tricky grammatical structures. One example of topic that's suitable for brute force memorization is the English preposition, which are notoriously tricky. The rules for them are often completely arbitrary, or even non-existent. Even when there are rules, it's so tricky to remember them that it's better just to memorize and not look for a system. Think of it like
trigonometry: although there are formal methods for calculating SIN, for the vast majority of us non-mathematicians, it more than suffices just to mash the button on the calculator.