Part 1: Moodle Blogs
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
go to moodle.nccu.edu.tw
log in, using your student number as username and password
change your password to something secret
update your profile; upload a picture if necessary
start your blog if you haven’t already
look at other people’s blogs
Part 2: Sketch Engine workshop
You can write with a pen (on blank paper, in your textbook, or on your news print-out). Or
you can type in a Word file, which you save on your flash drive or email to yourself. After
the class, you must send me the file.
Bold means a corpus term (for example concordance or collocation. “Quotes” mean an
ordinary word, like “energy” or “recycling”.
1. Do not start Sketch Engine yet!
2. In your textbook or news story print-out:
a. Highlight the 5 chosen words.
b. Write what part of speech (verb? noun?) the 5 words are.
c. Highlight the most important collocations in the 5 sentences (in a different
color)
d. Show what the grammar relationship is between the word and each collocate
3. Word sketch
a. Make word sketches for your chosen words, using UKWaC.
b. Do you see the collocations from your original sentence (1c)? Do they have a
high salience and frequency score?
c. Look at the different grammar relations.
i. What is the difference between object and object_of?
ii. What is the and/or relation?
iii. Are there any grammar relations which are unclear to you?
d. What are the top collocates (most salient/ most frequent) in each grammar
relation?
e. Try to imagine or guess a possible sentence, for the top collocates.
f. After guessing, click on the blue number, to get a concordance and look at the
actual sentences.
4. Open the BNC using SkE Beta, and make concordances for 2 or 3 of your chosen 5
words
a. Change from KWIC to sentence mode. What happens?
b. Click on the red keyword. What happens?
c. Expand the selection to left or right. What happens?
d. In view options, check tag. What happens?
e. What happens if you select display attributes and for each token?
f. Choose to get good dictionary examples (Also in view options). What
happens?
5. In the concordance output display, explain the function of:
a. Sample
b. Filter
c. Frequency
6. WebBootCat
a. Build a corpus on a topic of your choice, using WBC
i. Type in about five seed words
ii. Make sure the corpus is tagged
b. Make a wordlist for your corpus. Is the vocabulary related to the topic you
wanted?
c. Have a look at the corpus using Word Sketch or concordance.
7. Go back to the concordance query display. Expand the + signs to display more
options
8. Use the keywords section of the concordancer
a. look up a phrase (like the present paper)
b. What is the difference between a phrase and a collocation?
c. Figure out the difference between lemma and word form, by testing both.
d. Select the POS of the word (check noun, verb and adjective, even if you think
the word only has only 1 POS). Are there any surprises?
9. Context section
a. Query the same collocation as you used for your phrase in 6a
b. What is the window size for left and right context?
10. Try making some CQL queries (use SkE “Help”)
a. Search for the phrase from 6a.
b. Search for “happy” “boy”
i. Guess what word usually comes between “happy” and “boy”
ii. Search for “happy” (+any word) “boy”
iii. Select frequency / node forms to get a frequency chart.
iv. Was your guess correct? How about “happy” (+any word) “man”?
“Woman”?
c. We can say “take the bus”. However, is it ever OK to say “take bus”?
i. Search for “take” and “bus”, with 0, 1 or 2 words in between.
ii. What do you find? Use frequency / node forms to get a frequency
chart.
d. Search for “have” + any noun (with a few words in between).
i. Look at the tagset summary to find out how.
ii. What are the common patterns?
e. We can use “go” + present participle (“-ing”) to talk about activities like
swimming and fishing
i. What are the most common patterns with “go+ -ing”, in fact?
ii. Can you make a frequency chart which includes “goes”, “went”,
“gone” etc.?
11. Check back for the synonyms for your chosen words.
a. Open the thesaurus function
i. Do you see your chosen synonyms?
ii. Do you see any words which are definitely not synonyms? Why are
they there?
iii. Use the thesaurus function to open Sketch Differences. Report your
findings.