IFAConc –  friendly and meaningful concordancing

Many descriptive statements about language use can be successfully approached from the lexical angle. IFAConc enables users to explore lexical patterns, assign them meanings, save results in a database, re-use and share. Currently it serves academic learner writers, but its potential is far wider.

IFAConc puts users on the fast track to effective concordancing. It boasts:

• a friendly but powerful interface

• a growing range of linked resources

• an interactive and collaborative study environment

I will introduce and illustrate these advantages, and maybe more. But please visit me earlier:

http://wa.amu.edu.pl/~ifaconc

Przemysław Kaszubski

Phonetic enhancements to graded e-readers

Graded readers for (native) kids and EFL learners are carefully structured and controlled for vocabulary, syntax and style to make them conform to the I+1 level of the users.  But how about pronunciation? Do the many phonetic enhancements appearing in such electronic readers – pop-up lexica, model recordings, pronunciation drills, articulator animations, etc. – answer the real needs of the learners?  Do they correlate with the inherent phonetic difficulty of the text?  Do they receive their proper share of attention from the authors and editors?  Are e-readers phonetically graded?

Come and discover for yourself!  Włodzimierz Sobkowiak and Wiesława Ferlacka will present a preview of their recent major project focused on the http://www.readinga-z.com/ corpus.

Research on Learner Spoken Corpora

My angle in the Department of Computer Assisted English Linguistics is the realm of spoken corpora. All my research enterprises have their roots in the LINDSEI corpus of English learner spoken language – an international project with 11 teams already participating. I will briefly discuss the project, its webpages, and the research done on LINDSEI. The Polish research already touches upon:

• vagueness tags in Polglish & Polish

• negative adjective premodification

• discourse markers

The number of studies based on LINDSEI is growing fast, but is still tiny in comparison with written corpora. There is room for new researchers of spoken learner language!

Joanna Jendryczka-Wierszycka