ghoti

Japanese primary schools to teach 285 English words in 2011

From the Yomiuri Shimbun (copied and pasted due to lack of archive) Fifth- and sixth-year primary school students will learn a total of 285 English words and 50 expressions in compulsory English classes to be introduced in the 2011 school year, the Education, Science and Technology Ministry said Thursday. The students are expected to learn…
WordNet 3.0 Vocabulary Helper

This seems like an interesting tool, WordNet 3.0 Vocabulary Helper. Wikipedia defines WordNet as something which “groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets.” Created at Princeton University for research in Machine Translation. An offline version can be downloaded from…
Just The Word

I found this online concordancer called JustTheWord. It looks like it was made for teachers to search for (Japanese) student errors.
Errors in JACET 8000 Level Marker

I have been using the JACET8000 Level Marker (new link here) page for my research. It is a great tool. And I would like to thank the creator, Shinichi Shimizu, for it. However, when I checked the output I had found a number of errors. Below is a list of words which have been incorrectly…
KH Coder

KH Coder is a corpus linguistic tool for Japanese texts. Follow this link to learn more about Japanese corpus linguistics.
A Wordsmith Tools discussion list

Mike Scott, the creator of Wordsmith Tools has a mailing list by that name. The archive is open to public, but to post one must become a member of the list, pending approval.
Two useful pages for Range program

Here are two useful pages I found about Paul Nation’s Range program: BNC spoken freq TV as language teacher
Fixing the ‘Range check error’ in Range

I finally got Paul Nation’s Range program to work with my base word files, thanks to S.F.. The problem was in the fact I had unnecessary tabs and carriage returns between word families. But not having a digit after each word (like the original files) didn’t seem to affect the program’s performance.
Speaking isn’t the key

… most students learn how to speak English by actually speaking it. This comment original made in a letter to a Taiwanese newspaper about how teachers should make sure students produce a lot of L2 language while in classroom echoes the sentiment and attitude of many teachers in Japan. It could well have been a…
Corsis corpus tool

Corsis (formerly Tenka Text) is a now an open source project at Sourceforge. It is a freeware designed to look and feel like the commercial software and corpus tool standard, Wordsmith Tools. For more details and download see the Corsis main page.