[Tdol]

Originally Posted by Jing-Jo

Interesting thoughts...keep it going...TDOL, when you say you get your students to do (?) concordance checks on Google, how is it done? I am very new to this whole concordance data business but I like what I see...very interesting...

Cheers

Firstly, it's amazing how many people don't know how to use the " " in a search for a complete phrase. Armed with this, a student can do a simple comparison. Let's say we want to compare complete and utter with the word disgrace:

We do a search for "complete disgrace", using the inverted commas: 7,220, then we do "utter disgrace": 13,400. It is clear that both are correct, but 'utter' is more common. Now, let's try it with something else:

"complete change" 237,000
"utter change" 992
Here, the figures clearly show that 'complete'is the natural collocation.

British vs American usage

Compare http://www.google.com and http://www.google.co.uk, you can add Australian, http://www.google.com.au, etc. However, the .com doesn't only mean the USA- we're classified as US because we use a .com address, but it can give help.

Prepositional usage:

"Depend on" 18,200,000
"Depend of" (European student favourite mistake) 76,300
Google can help you with this.

This kind of use of Google as a language tool is easy and useful, but it has limitations. I think it's a good start.