Thinking about how to access the all so important high frequency words? How to approach authentic texts and how to investigate key words in texts? Will pupils pick up different meanings of verbs in various contexts? What vocabulary to teach?
Now language teachers and learners of languages in schools in England can have a free access to WordSmith, a tool that helps you to work on these questions. It is useful for teachers in finding appropriate texts, and creating worksheets. Students can use it for simple research on for example the language of poetry or rap, contextualising vocabulary or identifying word or grammatical patterns. It supports independent learners, and is an excellent tool for discovering the KAL strand.
Oxford WordSmith Tools is an integrated suite of programs for looking at how words behave in texts. For example - the Wordlist tool lets you see a list of all the words or word-clusters in a text, set out in alphabetical or frequency order. The concordancer, Concord, gives you a chance to see any word or phrase in context -- so that you can see what sort of company it keeps. With KeyWords you can find the key words in a text.
The tools are used by Oxford University Press for their own lexicographic work in preparing dictionaries, by language teachers and students, and by researchers investigating language patterns in many languages and countries world-wide.
The creator, Mike Scott, currently works as a Reader in corpus linguistics at Aston University. He holds a PhD in Linguistics and Modern English language, and has a long career in teaching.
To find out more about WordSmith, click here or email us to get your free licence!
