Here are very useful tools for designing classroom materials. These tools encourage teachers to create and design class contents and materials more properly and effectively. They helps teachers can decide what to teach their students in the class.
As you know, languages form, change, and cease to exist according to the passing of time. Languages are very different depending on situations and contexts. Thus most frequently used words can be different from contexts and situations. Teachers should select high frequency words considerably and create materials properly.
Following these tools help teachers make good and proper mateials for their students. I'll explain these tools briefly.
1. Compleat Lexical Tutor: http://www.lextutor.ca/
How can we learn vocabulary? It is very difficult to answer the question because there are so many ways to learn vocabulary. Perhaps only thing we can be sure of is repetition(practice or recycling). According to Keith Folse(2004), learners should be given opportunities to exposure new words various ways(in various contexts), so that the words will be stored from short-term to long-term memory. And Tom Cobb(1999) suggested that if learners exposure words in a variety of contexts, they can keep and recall them easily. These are basic concept of this tool.
The Compleat Lexical Tutor is an online based interactive tool for learning vocabulary in a variety of contexts. It is divided into three sections: learners, researchers, teachers. It gives both students and teachers a lot of opportunities to learn and teach most frequently used words and analyze the words in variety of contexts. Teachers can generate activities in teacher's section, and students can self study in learners section. Especially, researchers' section is very useful. It allows to analyze the high frequency words and teachers can refer to them and make proper classroom materials. The online Concordancer allows students to search a variety of corpora for correct language use in authentic texts. As I mentioned above, it is very important for learners to learn high frequency words and know how to use them in authentic contexts. To summarize, this site is very useful and powerful tool to design adequate classroom mateirals.
2. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
The second site is 'The Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)'. It is the largest freely-available corpus of American English. And it is easy to use and understand.
The corpus has very different divisions like fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. It contains more than 450 million words of text and it is updated rugulary. Thus we can search current(contemporary) and high frequency words. And teachers can cross check(analyze) between spoken and written use of language and so on. Teachers can compare, anlyze them and develop some teaching points like descriptive grammar. Teachers also can contrast and compare the collocates of two related words, to determine the difference in meaning or use between these words. Teachers can find numerous synonyms words, compare their frequency in different contexts, and can easily create their own words lists.
3. Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/
The third tool is Wordle. It is a free, easy-to-use and very visual site. It can be used to express high frequency words and low frequency words. Fonts, layouts and color can be expressed for differnt effects. Teacher can use the tool as a pre-teaching activity to introduce a new words to students.
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