Media Pembelajaran Bahasa Inggris ( unit 7 )

Name : Septi Mardiana

NPM : 06211210665

Class : B / IV

Subject : Media Pembelajaran Bahasa Inggris

UNIT 8

ONLINE REFERENCE TOOLS

Dictionaries and thesauruses

Dictionaries

Whether your students are using bilingual, semi-bilingual or monolingual learners dictionaries in paper or electronic form, there is no denying that there is a far greater range of dictionary reference tools available than was the case even ten years ago. It is not the intention of this section to advice on the use of dictionaries in the classroom, bus rather to outline some of the features that electronic dictionaries include and to show how they have developed beyond the printed page. The one thing we would say about these hand-held electronic dictionaries is that their content is often inaccurate and that, if you can you should advise your students on the range of products before they purchase, as you probably have done in the past with paper dictionaries. A thesaurus can do wonders for writing projects. It can encourage learners to be more adventurous in their creative writing at the same time as helping he to analyses their output more critically.

Concordance’s and corpuses for language analysis

A Concordance’s is similar to search engine in many respects. Essentially, it is small program that can examine large quantities of text for patterns and occurrences of particular words or phrases. Concordance’s are often considered to be the domain of the language researcher or the kind of tool used by writers of grammar references and weighty linguistic tomes. And indeed they are primarily used in this domain.

Use in class

You can use the corpus for generating test material such as cloze exercises and exam practice materials. at higher levels, a corpus can serve as a useful reference tool in the classroom for the more intricate examples of language use. Example. ‘What’s the difference between glisten and glitter?’ parallel concordancers, which compare texts in two or more languages, can also be useful for examining how structures are dealt with in and first and second languages.

Translators for language analysis

Translation software is still in its infancy and at the time of writing remains unreliable and in many instances of dubious quality.

Encyclopedias for research and project work

It used to be the case that having access to an encyclopedia meant also needing to have a large set of shelves on which to store all of the volumes. This collection of volumes then became a small CD-ROM sitting next to our computers, and these days is more likely to be a collection of web addresses to useful and authoritative sources online. Informational reference sites based on printed material are a good starting point and here we would include paper-bused volumes such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, as wall as Microsoft Encarta, Which was originally published on CD-ROM.