ghoti

Japan, China, South Korea mull academic credit system

From the Daily Yomiuri due to the lack of archiving. The education ministry has decided to draw up a new framework in conjunction with China and South Korea to allow universities in all three countries to integrate methods to evaluate students’ academic achievements and certify academic credits. The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry…
How to save a Word 2007 document as a PDF

Microsoft Office Word 2007 now allows you to save a document as PDF. All you have to do is choose to save it as a PDF in File Type in the Save or Save as dialogue box. If you don’t see it in the File Type dropdown list you may have to get the update…
Statistical terms – measurement

Generally, there are four data types in statistics: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio. Nominal data as the name suggests is characterize data by name. For example, the categorization of someone as male or female is nominal data. There is no order or rank between nominal data or only difference. Ordinal data is data which can…
Jacet 8000 Level Marker has moved

The Jacet 8000 Level Marker has moved to: http://www.tcp-ip.or.jp/~shim/J8LevelMarker/j8lm.cgi The errors I highlighted from two years ago still remain, however.
Why we should continue to teach the “‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’” spelling rule

The British government has said this spelling rule is no longer worth teaching because there are so many exceptions to the rule. I think this is a mistake – a mistake to get rid of it and a mistake or misunderstanding of where the rule is supposed to be applied. I was taught this rule…
Developing Linguistic Corpora

Here is a nice guide for corpus linguistics entitled Developing Linguistic Corpora at: http://ahds.ac.uk/creating/guides/linguistic-corpora/index.htm Contributors to this online text are John Sinclair, Geoffrey Leech, Lou Burnard, Paul Thompson and Martin Wynne (editor). This text is not written for the English teacher in mind and some technical points may be difficult to grasp.
Online concordancing

If you require just a simple concordancer then go to Concordancer at http://ec.hku.hk/vocabulary/concordancer.htm. It give only counts and highlights of the search term with no KWIC.
Praat

Praat is “a free scientific computer software program for the analysis of speech in phonetics”.
ConcApp 5

The concordancer software ConcApp (version 5) has now become purchaseware. It is an easy to use program recommended for those learning to use corpus and concordancers. Its best feature, though, is that it can be used for not only English and French texts but also Japanese (tested), Chinese, Thai and Russian. While it is purchaseware…
The WordSmith Tools mailing list

If you use WordSmith Tools and you haven’t already become a member of Mike Scott’s WordSmith Tools mailing list then you should. Questions and queries about the program and its use can be made at this open forum. More information can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/WordSmithTools/.