| [图文]Lingonet VideoCorpus CD-Rom |
热 ★★★ |
Lingonet VideoCorpus CD-Rom
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| Author：Wayne Tr… Source：bebc.co.uk Hits： UpdateTime：2007-1-30 18:57:13 |
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 Lingonet Oy, Published: 2006.
Level: Intermediate and above
Components: CD-Rom
Review received 11.06.
Details or Reviewer - an English lecturer teaching at a university in Turkey (Izmir).
LINGONET OY favour the use of video clips on CD for language teaching materials. Their recent and popular programs Teentalk and Business Territories both use this format and tend to aim at more able language learners dealing with specific aspects of English in higher education and vocational training contexts. VideoCorpus admirably continues this emphasis, but also contains an IT-competent linguist’s cutting-edge tool – concordancing software.
VideoCorpus consists of short video clips of native speakers of British English debating fifteen wide-ranging controversial issues including animal rights, equality, the monarchy and gun law. After an introductory speaker poses the key questions on each topic, individuals from various backgrounds present their cases in sections of one- or two-minute slots. The number of speakers ranges from ten to twenty and the material totals approximately ten hours of authentic recorded speech that may, if the user chooses, be accompanied by individual transcripts of the unedited text. As the text includes all key features of natural speech such as hesitation, self-correction, fillers and repetition this alone
amounts to a potential corpus of 75.000 words, but more on that below.
Since all of the above simply opens on screen, the program at this stage was easy to move around in and functioned in the same manner as a video cassette – if anyone can still recall such a thing! So far, so good, but I still wonder how much all the language exposure in the many clips would benefit learners of English beyond listening and reading, probably with immense interest, so as to simply match and follow speech and sound. The video texts are clearly aimed at users at intermediate level and above but looked in
need of accompanying language tasks. Teachers could quite easily copy and paste the text to produce their own personal material. Those intending to use this material will require Adobe Acrobat files on their pc.
It was not so obvious for the average user (such as this reviewer) to initially work out the second and much more valuable function of this program: the potential to build a personal corpus from the texts available and subsequently to engage in some useful concordancing to identify collocating items and near neighbours, and to detect word frequency. After consulting the user’s manual (and my IT colleague next door), then locating TextSTAT-2 and engaging in a bit of trial and error, I was soon up and running with the concordancing search tool.
Although it’s obviously useful to create a corpus with the 75,000 words of natural speech available on VideoCorpus in order to analyse the features mentioned above, it’s also possible to either add your own to this or simply design your own ESP corpus that should enable you to, let’s say, study the use of commas and semi-colons in legal documents written in English. One other useful feature of this superb program is the link to the downloadable and extremely interesting document by Mike Nelson that introduces and explains corpora on a nontechnical level along with how to make good use of corpus analysis both as an independent learner and as a classroom teacher.
Review by Wayne Trotman - November 2006 Edition of the EL Gazette. Reship please add：(Copy from：sinoec.net)
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