Online Reference Tools

ONLINE REFERENCE TOOLS

a.       Dictionaries and thesauruses

Dictionaries

You may well have the experience of students bringing into class small hand held electronic dictionaries. The one things we would say about these hand held electronic dictionaries is that the content is often in accurate and that,if you can,you should advise your students on the range of products before they purchase, as you probably have done in the past with paper dictionaries. Virtually all of the major monolingual learners dictionaries are sold with a CD-Rom. These CD-Rom often have some or all of these features:

1.       Searchability (which is not alphabetically based)

2.       Audio recordings of the words, often in both British and American English

3.       Games and excersises

4.       Information on typical errors

5.       The ability to bookmark and personalize

6.       Thesaurus functionality

7.       Corpus informed information on frequency

Thesauruses

A thesaurus can do wonders for writing projects. It can encourage learners to be more adventurous in their creative writing at the same time as helping them to analyse their output more critically.

b.      Concordancers and corpuses for language analysis

A concordancers is similar to a search engine in many respects. Essentially it is a small program that can examine large quantities of text for patterns and occurrences of particular words and phrases.

·         Concordancing programs:

-          Monoconc(www.monoconc.com)

-          Concordance(www.concordancesoftware.com)

-          Paraconc{for parallel corpuses}(www.athel.com)

-          Wordsmith tools(http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/index.html)

·         Corpuses:

-          British national corpus(http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk)

-          COBUILD(http://www.collins.co.uk)

-          International Corpus of English(http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice-gb/index.htm)

-          American National Corpus(http://www.americannationalcorpus.org)

c.       Translators for language analysis

Translation software is still its infancy and at the time of writing remains on reliable and in many instance of dubious quality. However, it is mentioning, if only to point outs to your learners the dangers it posses if they use it in appropriately, for example to carry out a translation assignment into their own language.

d.      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 than become a small CD-Rom sitting next to our computers, and these days is more likely to be a collection of web addresses to useful and authoritative sources online.