MICUSP LINK
Activity #1 - Finding LAs in Your Own Essay
What is a "corpus"?
Corpus = large collection of (usually) written documents compiled for a purpose. It can be accessed through an online website. Users can search for keywords (such as linking adverbials) and collocations. Keywords for this site: because besides, although, instead of, furthermore, since
A learner corpus is a collection of texts from a person (or people) who is not (are not) expert writers. This can be useful for comparison with the experts. Here are the steps to searching your own:
(1) Open your previous document. Skim it to see if you recognize any LAs.
(2) Go to "find" in the upper right corner on your screen. Type in any Linking Adverbial that you saw while quickly reading or that you remember having written. (See "Semantic Categories for Adverbials" if you are unsure of these words/phrases.)
(3) Note how many times you used this word.
(4) Repeat for other LAs.
A. What words did you find? Did you use any of the keywords?
B. Did you notice any words that tend to appear near that linking adverbial?
Words that frequently appear near a given word are its collocations.
C. Based on common knowledge of English, can you think of any possible collocations for “get”?
*Optional Extension for Extra Credit: Compile a mini-corpus of the essays that you wrote in Writing 5. Save all of them into a folder. Then copy and paste, so as to make one document containing all of these texts. Do the activity above by searching this collection of essays instead of only one of your previously written essays.
Follow these steps for Activity #1