1301 The compleat lexical tutor! Want to improve your English and have lots of fun as well?
austraLasia 1301

The compleat lexical tutor!  Want to improve your English and have lots of fun as well?
 and if you are teaching English to young Salesians in Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Fiji, Philippines, Australia or anywhere, please read on...

CYBERSPACE: 23rd October 2005 --  More than fifty percent of austraLasia's readers are speakers of English as an Other Tongue (EOT), as this writer likes to term it, since English is best not described as 'foreign' (EFL), nor for many users as a 'second language' (ESL), since for many it may be a third, fourth or 'other' tongue.
    The single most commented-on feature of austraLasia in the past year has been the occasional addition of a vocabulary or lexicon beneath a news item: that same 50% (or higher) of readers finds it of value.  Well, here is an offer that even the other 50% (or lower!) will find useful and that both groups will enjoy.  It is called The Compleat Lexical Tutor and you can connect to it at www.lextutor.ca .
    The Compleat Lexical Tutor is a goldmine.  It works online, so I'm sorry - if you can't spend at least five minutes online to take a look, then this one is not for you.  If your access is unlimited, then beware!!  Your community will curse you if you are 'hogging' the only computer in the place.  But this is a forgivable addiction.  Whether you are in Suva, Ulaanbaatar, Shanghai, Daejeong, Lahore, Melbourne....there is something there for you.
    You will find three columns. (Oh, and if you also speak French, there are additional joys in store).  The left hand column is the best column for English learners.  Start with the 'test your word level' item.  Take it from me, with some experience in this area; this is not cheap fun, it is valuable fun.  The tests are based on the very best of orpus-driven studies in English (the main corpus collections are to be found in Britain and the US), and other than paying fairly steep amounts to get hold of the British National Corpus of a million plus words, you can't do better than The Compleat Lexical Tutor to gain access for nothing - but access that actually does something for you.  So try your word levels.  I started with the last one and almost had my pride dashed...but saved myself at the last moment!  There's lots more in that column, but for the learners, I recommend Read Resource Assisted:  there you can listen to 'The Call of the Wild' (you'll nead Realplayer) and call up words you don't know through a link to Wordnet, another marvellous lexical resource which linguists swear by.
    The 'Research' column, the middle column, is just as interesting and there is nothing stopping anyone from exploring it.  The text tools can be very useful - you have to work with .txt extension however.  If anyone finds these tools useful, I can give you an even better and absolutely free instrument that works with .doc and .html as well, and you don't need the intenet to run it.  Just send a note to the return address for austraLasia and I'll send it along.
    English teachers (the third column is called 'Teachers') will find useful material there too; everyone should find the Brown or BNC Corpus collections useful, but I'd suggest you read the 'why and wherefore' in the second column to get a better idea of how they can be useful.
    If this reaches you on Sunday, and it's a quiet day with not a lot else to do.....do enjoy!  JBF

VOCABULARY
hogging:  the verb 'hog' is colloquial and means to be selfish, or at least to take more than your fair share!
corpus:  in this context a 'body' of words; a list of anything up to several million words taken from real language, what people say.
steep: normally means a slope more than 45 degrees, but whenever it is near the word 'pay' it means high prices: pay a steep amount!
swear by:  while 'swearing' usually means using bad language, its real origins are the taking of an oath, 'swearing by' Almighty God.  This is the sense here.