Beth,

    I have been trying to work in that territory for some time, and my quick answer is that students find it very interesting.

    One very useful tool is the Longman Grammar of spoken and Written English (Biber et. al.), which looks at language patterns across different “registers” (their term), those being conversation, fiction, newspapers, and academic writing. The full grammar is expensive, but they have a very good student grammar, which is very reasonably priced. The book takes the approach that these patterns are functionally driven.

    Is their writing “correct”? Is their writing effective? As they learn to do the work of these genres, they are learning to use language resources in ways similar to others who handle these registers well.

    

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Beth Young
Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2015 1:07 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: frequency analysis of student text

 

Has anyone ever tried having students analyze their text & compare it to a similar analysis of published / expert text?

I haven't tried it, but wonder if an activity like that might be interesting to students.


Beth

Dr. Beth Rapp Young
Associate Professor, English
[log in to unmask]

University of Central Florida
"Reach for the Stars"

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Hancock, Craig G [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2015 12:50 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: frequency analysis of student text

Mike,

    These look like useful leads. Lextutor has a concordance check with input text, and that is basically what I am looking for. I will take some time looking through the rest.

    We have already been using COCA. COCA allows a student to input a small amount of text, with word frequency measured against the larger corpus (fairly rough categories.) I wanted some way to explore key words and repetition in their own or successful texts.

    This is very helpful.

 

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael Busch
Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2015 1:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: frequency analysis of student text

 

WordSmith Tools. See www.lexically.net/wordsmith


These websites have been around for a long time, so they are well developed. I suggest looking at Anderson and Corbitt's "Exploring English With Online Corpora: An Introduction." or "Linquist's Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English."

Mike

 

Does anyone know of a student friendly resource for doing analysis of text? Is there a site where a student can load in a text and get back an analysis of word frequencies, sentence patterns, and the like, for their own or for someone else’s writing? Is anyone doing that routinely with students?

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/

 

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/