New Web-Based Corpus Tools for Language Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Over the past decades, various corpora and corpus interfaces have been developed that have mainly served linguists and lexicographers for the purpose of language exploration and analyses. These interfaces have also been aimed at language teachers for language teaching purposes as well as language learners who wanted to engage in corpus consultation to gain knowledge on various aspects of the target language, such as grammar, words in context, word collocation, among others. The standard and traditional corpus interfaces, however, have not always proven to be easy tools for teachers and learners given that they require sufficient training before they can be used effectively. To overcome these challenges, a number of alternative web-based corpus tools have been introduced having language teachers and learners in mind. In this paper we examine and evaluate two state-of-the-art corpus tools: SKELL and Netspeak.