1. The Word Sketch function
When you selected Word Sketch, you will enter the following screen. Adjust the
search conditions, such as: In the lemma enter the word you want to query, select
the part of speech, noun, verb or adjective.
Using “cheese” as an example, type "cheese" in Lemma, select noun, then presses
the button of "show word sketch". Then you will see the following screen.
In the above figure, we can see lots of words and numbers. It shows many different
combinations of “words + cheese”. And it also shows the different grammatical
relations of them. You can also click the links of those numbers, you can find more
examples sentence of cheese. For example, “make 639”.
Then you can see lots of “part of the sentence” in the new window. That might be not
very easy to understand what’s the meaning of the word (as the example we used:
cheese) in the fragmental sentence. There is useful function that can be used to make
the sentence become easier to read, View options.
Click the View Options and then click KWIC Sentence. You will find that the sentence
become complete and the word you choose will be marked in red.
The red word can also be clicked. You can find out more about the sentence. You can
do so to see part of the article. That might give you more information about the word
and help you to understand how to use the word in normal writings. If you want to
see more of the article, you can click expand left or expand right. After all, it’s
hard to understand the clear meaning of the word or the sentence included the word
by just looking one sentence of the whole article.
The following is what I found of cheese.
The anonymously named cheese is made by a small family run business in the village .
Because of the large quantities of milk used to make just one cheese it is usual for
groups of farmers to work together as co-operatives .
At one time this place obtained considerable celebrity for cheese made from skimmed
milk .
You can find out lots of information by looking these sentences. Not only the
meaning of cheese, but also how to make cheese or what cheese made from.
2. Concordances, The thesaurus, Sketch Differences
(1) Concordance
When you generate a concordance, there are several options for increasing its
usefulness.
to other parts of the program
which corpus you are using, and how
many hits match your search item
Now we see the second row buttons

View Options: This button lets you can switch the view pattern between
standard KWIC concordance view and full sentence view. That’s mean you can
change the length of the sentences you want to view.

The Sample button: It will show you a random sample of the corpus lines, to
any figure you specify. If you enter 30 then you will get 30 examples.

The Sort buttons: you can use the three items on a submenu to do a simple sort.
It let the word in the place to the left, or middle, or right.

The Frequency button: view two types of frequency information regarding your
search term:
 Multilevel frequency distribution
 Text type frequency distribution

The Collocation button allows you to generate lists of words that co-occur
frequently with your node word. You can find out what’s the words usually be
used with the chosen word.
(3)The Thesaurus function
This function is similar to dictionary. The thesaurus function lists, for each adjective,
noun or verb, the other words most similar to it in their use in the language.
(4) The Sketch Difference function
The Sketch Difference function is to comparing two very similar words. It shows those
patterns and combinations that the two items have in common, and also those
patterns and combinations that are more typical of, or unique to, one word rather
than the other.
"Common Patterns": there are four numbers next to each collocate. The first two
indicate the frequency of the two words you want to compare, the last two show the
scores for the collocate with both words. All collocates are sorted according to
maximum of the two scores and colored according to difference between the scores.
It tells you which word we can use with both words.
Below the "Common Patterns", there is the pattern only in each word. It can let you
know which is always using with one word, and which is using with other words.
3. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using corpora to
learn languages.
One of the disadvantages of learning through the corpora is that using corpora to
learn English really needs some foundations of English learning. If some students
want to learn English by searching the meanings of the word but without some
English learning foundations, they might faced some difficulties such as: can not
understand how to use the website. Hard to know what should do next and what’s
the meaning of the results. They must need someone like a teacher to teach them
how to use the corpora as a useful tool.
And the other defect of the corpora is that one can hardly understand the exactly
meanings of the chosen word. The examples are brief and fragmental. In most time,
one needs to find out more of the sentences or try to find as more examples as one
can. One has to get more information to make the meaning or the way to use the
word more clearly.
But the corpora also have many excellences. Usually, when we use a dictionary to
look up one word, we only can find the definition and maybe some examples. But we
cannot find out how to use the word properly in normal writing. The corpora can help
us to fix this problem. For example, I used “cheese” as a sample to explain in the
first question. And when I’m searching “cheese”, I found lots of information of
cheese. For example, the way of producing cheese. Not the whole recipe but only
few steps. And I also found out that the ingredients of cheese can be many kind, not
just only”milk”.
Another kind of advantage of learning through corpora is that we can find many
different kinds of article that differ from our textbook or novel. It might be come
from a sciential article or academic essay. The style of writing might be very hard to
get used to, but it really has the value of learning. Students should try to look as
many writing style as they can to improve their reading ability and writing skill.
In conclusion, if one already have some English learning foundation, then one will be
joy to use the corpora as a helpful tool. But if one is a beginner, he or she might think
that it’s hard to use and need some times to understand all the function’s meaning
and what exactly those function can help.