Online references tools

Chapter 8
In this chapter we are going to see:

 Dictionaries and thesauruses

 Concordancers and corpuses for language analysis
 Translator for language analysis
 Encyclopedias for research and project work

Dictionaries
Using dictionaries in class may bring about advantages as well as disadvantages.

The first advantage of using dictionaries in class is “Learners can continue to make
progress in their learning beyond the classroom”, they can practice and improve their
vocabulary bank through the use of dictionaries in their houses.

The second benefit is “The knowledge of the users will be increased, along with their
vocabulary”, students may improve and increased their knowledge about English.

The third advantage is “A bilingual dictionary enables the students to understand the
meaning of the words”, when students use a bilingual dictionary they understand the
meaning of words more easily.

The last benefit is “Dictionaries help to generate texts and are resources for
vocabulary acquisition”, when learners use dictionaries, they can improve their
writing skills and generate creative texts.

On the other hand, using dictionaries has some disadvantages for learners.

 “Learners may tend to overuse the dictionary”

 Dictionaries will require some learner training before they can be used in an
effective way.
  Most dictionaries do not specify if an expression is in current use.
 An untrained user about dictionaries may encounter lots of issues to use them.

Thesauruses
Thesaurus is an online service that provides alternative or similar words to a word. When you
visit thesaurus on the internet, you can search a word and then it will provide you a definition,
what kind of word it is, its synonyms and its antonyms.

Learners can use thesaurus to improve their vocabulary bank.

Concordancers and corpuses for languages analysis

A concordancer is similar to a search engine. It is a small program that can examine
large quantities of text for patterns and occurrences of particular words or phrases.
Furthermore, it is a useful tool used by writers of grammar references and linguistic
tomes

Concordancing involves the use of the program itself and a corpus, or large body of
text, to be analyzed. Corpuses are compiled from a variety of sources: written
collections such as newspapers or journals, or spoken collections taken from the radio
and television sources.
The concordancer searches the corpus, asks it about a particular word and how it is
used, and then you get a screen of results from a part of the corpus showing the word
and enough text either side to be able to understand the context in which it is used.

Corpuses
When choosing a concordancer, the main evaluation criterion, apart from the price
and ease of use of the software, will be the type of language you want to work with:
spoken or written American or British English, legal or journalistic and so on.

Use in class
Corpuses can be used with lower levels to initiate some thought and discussion on the
use of two words.

You can use the corpus for generating test material such as cloze exercises and exam
practice materials. At higher levels, a corpus can serve as a useful reference tool in the
classroom for the more intricate examples of language use.

A concordancer can be a powerful ally and helper that is why this tool should be used
sparingly and thoughtfully. Also, you have to make sure that the corpus fits what you
are teaching, test the concordance results beforehand so that you are not caught
unawares by the results your learners may get, and ensure that they are comfortable
with the tool and the technology.

Translators for language analysis

Translation software is still in their infancy and at the time of writing length texts
remains unreliable and in many instances of dubious quality. However, it is worth to
mentioning that this software could be dangerous if they are use inappropriately. For
example, The AltaVista site, Babel Fish leads the way offering quick-based translation.
It could translate single words or short phrases without cohesion problems.

These types of software are interesting vehicles for getting learners to notice the
language they are working with, to recognize grammar structures and to process
language in an engaging and often amusing way.
Translators can be used as an intermediate tool for students, which involve quite a lot
of language processing, and also it will help to highlight the issues of relying too
heavily on technology. We could use the site to get an idea of the content of certain
web pages or texts we do not speak, or even to engage in text chats with speakers of
other languages.

ENCYCLOPEDIAS FOR RESEARCH AND PROJECT WORK

It used to be the case that having access to an encyclopedia meant also needing to
have a large set of shelves on which to store all of the volumes. This collection of
volumes became a small CD-ROM and these days are more likely to be a collection of
website addresses to useful and authoritative sources online. The student should take
in account how often is the website updated and how many editors can work on it.
For example there are sites such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Encarta and the
Columbia Encyclopedia whose can safely be considered accurate and fairly
comprehensive. Also we can find Wikipedia which is updated every minute of every
day but it is not considered as accurate as the others because it depends on the
editors’ experience.

The wealth of information contained on these sites opens up the world to our
learners in a way that more traditional collections of classroom objects cannot. This is
why project work becomes less arduous for students. It leaves them free to
concentrate on the language side of things and able to access the information they
need for any particular task from a reliable source.

Subject: T.I.C Course: 2° “B”

Students: Hurtado, Rocio.
López, Cristian.
Molina, Tania.
Ochoa, Aylen.