Online Reference

Tools
(Dudeney & Hockly, 2007, pp.103-112)
Budi Jayadi
Srihidayanti

The presentation will cover:

Dictionaries and thesaurus

Concordancers and corpuses for language

analysis
Translators for language analysis
Encyclopedias for research and project work

Dictionaries and thesauruses

Paper Dictionaries

Electronic/Online
Dictionaries

Features of Electronic Dictionaries (CD-ROM)

Searchability (which is not alphabetically based)
Audio recordings of the words, often in both British and
American English
Games and exercises
Information on typical errors
The ability to bookmark and personalize
Thesaurus functionality
Corpus informed information on frequency
Example: Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary

Considerations on using dictionaries

and thesauruses
Advise students about which electronic/online dictionary is

appropriate for their language level.

Choose a reputable electronic/online dictionaries and
thesauruses.
Integrate dictionaries and thesauruses into day-to-day
teaching
Carry out dictionary and thesaurus use training
Use thesaurus for intermediate and advanced level
Use thesaurus to improve students writing skills

Exercise on using thesaurus

Look at the Thesaurus Worksheet 1
To do the exercise, ask students to go to:
http://www.thesaurus.com/

Concordancers and corpuses for

language analysis
A concordancer:
is search engine-like
program
can examine large
quantities of text for
patterns and occurrences of
particular words or phrases.
It is used by:
grammarian and linguists
ELT materials writers

Corpus is:
created database of large
body of text
written (newspapers/journals)
or spoken collections
(radio/television/recorded
conversation)
Tagged text
(location/position/frequency)

Concordancing program and corpus

Concordancing
programs

Monoconc
Concordance
Paraconc
Wordsmith Tools
AntConc (Free)

Corpuses

British National Corpus

COBUILD
International Corpus of English
American National Corpus
LexTutor (Free)

Use of concordance and corpus in

class
Corpus can be used for generating test materials (e.g. cloze

exercises and exam practice materials)

Corpus can be used as reference tool for intricate examples of
language use
Parallel concordancers can be used to compare structure in
L1 and L2
Corpus can be used for discovery activity

Some consideration on using

concordancers and corpus
Concordancers can bring difficulties to learners.
Concordancers should be used sparingly and thoughtfully

(use word processor to present the corpus).

Corpus should be in line with teaching objectives.
Teacher should be familiar with what will be taught.
Teacher should train learners how to use the concordancers
well beforehand.

Exercise on concordancer and corpus: COCA

Look at handout about COCA (Corpus of Contemporary

American English) Exercises

Answer questions in every step by visiting the COCA site:
http://corpus.byu.edu/

Translators for language

analysis
Free Web-based machine translation
systems:
Applied Language
Google Translate
SDL Automated Translation Solutions
Windows Live Translator
Yahoo! Babel Fish SYSTRAN

Advantages of machine translation:

When time is a crucial factor, machine translation
can save the day.
It is comparatively cheap.
Confidentiality is another matter which makes
machine translation favorable.
A machine translator usually translates text which is
in any language.

Disadvantages of Machine Translation:

Systematic and formal rules are followed by machine
translation so it cannot concentrate on a context and
solve ambiguity and neither makes use of experience or
mental outlook like a human translator can.
Accuracy is not offered by the machine translation on a
consistent basis (e.g. Babel Fish Translator).
http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/machinetranslation.htm

Original text
Hi! My name is Gerard Hunt and I am an English
teacher and technologist. I live and work in Caracas,
Venezuela, and I have been here for 17 years. Caracas
is a great place and I enjoy living here.

Translation
back to English

Hello! My name is Gerard Hunt and I'm Professor d\'

English and technologist. J\' lives and works in Caracas
(Venezuela) and I'm here for 17 years. Caracas is a
perfect and j\' love living here.

Original text
Hi! My name is Gerard Hunt and I am an English
teacher and technologist. I live and work in Caracas,
Venezuela, and I have been here for 17 years. Caracas
is a great place and I enjoy living here.

Translation
back to English

Hello! My name is Gerard Hunt and I'm Professor d\'

English and technologist. J\' lives and works in Caracas
(Venezuela) and I'm here for 17 years. Caracas is a
perfect and j\' love living here.

Encyclopedias for research and

project work
Informational reference sites
Encyclopedia Britannica
Microsoft Encarta
Wikipedia
Columbia Encyclopedia

Advantages of Wikipedia

Anyone can edit (Wikipedia)

Easy to use and learn
Wikis are instantaneous
People located in different parts of the world can work on the same
document
The wiki software keeps track of every edit made and it's a simple
process to revert back to a previous version of an article
Widens access to the power of web publishing to non-technical users
The wiki has no predetermined structure
There are a wide range of open source software wiki's to choose
from so licensing costs shouldn't be a barrier to installing an
institutional wiki

Disadvantages
Anyone can edit so this may be too open for some
applications.
Open to SPAM and Vandalism if not managed properly.
Requires Internet connectivity to collaborate, but technologies
to produce print versions of articles are improving
The flexibility of a wiki's structure can mean that information
becomes disorganized.
The usual guidelines for healthy computer use apply
http://wikieducator.org/Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_a_wiki/Advantages_and_disadvantages

Britannica.com

Project
Work

Topic:
country

Write a short report

or description on
your country

Visit
encyclopedia
Britannica.com
Wikipedia.org
Encyclopedia.co
m

Name

: .

Capital city

: ..

Population

: ..

Languages

: ..

National holiday

: ..

Flag

: ..

religion

: ..

Complete your
chart