Credits

Laura Korhonen, Ilona Laakkonen, Britta Schneider, Richard Van Camp

About the project

Corpus project was the working title of what ended up as Edna and Bernie's Corpus Library. When we took the Koo-Kit programme in Solki, Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Jyväskylä, we knew virtually nothing about language corpora and even less about web design. After two semesters, hours of experimental learning, unfamiliar scripts and codes and undefined amounts of coffee and Dr.Pepper, we now can say to understand something about corpora, get along with Dreamweaver and Flash, and know what is involved in constructing an online learning material as a team.

The overall design and structure of the material is the product of genuine team work. The MICASE and presentation skills section is the work of Laura's, and she also designed and drew Edna and Bernie. Ilona created the sections on Google and VIEW. The other sections were realised by Ilona Laakkonen, with a contribution from Laura Korhonen.

Thanks

We owe a great deal to Britta Schneider and Richard Van Camp at the University Language Centre for their advice and support - and for introducing the original idea of creating this corpus tutorial in the first place. We also want to thank the staff at Solki for their time and expertise, and the other Koo-Kit teams in 2005-2006 for sharing their problems, experiences and HTML tricks with us. Of course, a special thanks goes to the men, mothers, children, cats and dogs of the home front for their patience and support.

Work in progress 2007

The Corpus Project has come a long way, and the nearly finished Corpus Library is much more complex than anticipated and therefore required some finishing touches in some parts of it. We also added self-access logs to the Google, View and Micase sections to enable teachers and learners to trace and evaluate their learning progress.

Sources and inspiration

This material is not entirely produced from scratch. For exercises, ideas, tips etc. we have exploited at least the following online sources:

Corpora interfaces

  • VIEW: Variation in English Words and Phrases (online) http://view.byu.edu/
  • MICASE: The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (online) http://micase.umdl.umich.edu/m/micase/

Using Google as a corpus

  • http://www.hltmag.co.uk/may00/idea.htm
  • http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/tesl-ej/ej26/int.html

Corpus exercises

  • http://web.quick.cz/jaedth/Introduction%20%to20CCS.htm
  • http://learningresources.eli.ubc.ca/corpus/links/lab.pdf
  • http://learningresources.eli.ubc.ca/corpus/links/lab1.pdf

Learner errors

  • http://elex.amu.edu.pl/~przemka/concord2adv/errors.htm
  • http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/my-english.html

Word families

  • http://www.uefap.com/vocab/build/building.htm

Phrasal verbs

  • http://eslcafe.com/pv
  • http://englishpage.com/prepositions/phrasaldictionary.html

Presentation skills

  • http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art1.html

Transitional devices

  • http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/transitions.htm

Academic writing and register

  • http://elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eap/academicstyle.htm
  • http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/learningdev/writing_for_ac/register.asp
  • http://www.uefap.com/materials/matfram.htm
  • http://owl.english.purdue.edu/