Introduction
IFAConc is a tool for personal and collaborative study of specialist/academic and non-specialist language use. IFAConc provides a platform for annotated concordancing activities for EAP learners and teachers of the AMU School of English (IFA) who want to take advantage of guided advanced-level data-driven learning (DDL). IFAConc is inspired by corpus-driven theory, in particular Michael Hoey's lexical priming; methodologically, it expands on Tom Cobb's idea of URL-driven concordances as feedback for learner writers and on Tim Johns' Kibbitzer pages; within EAP pedagogy, major inspiration has come from Ken Hyland's studies contrasting general and specific approaches to academic writing.
Previews and tutorials (update pending):
Examples of annotated tasks (one reason for which IFAConc was built):
- Compare the patterns of use and the relative frequencies of CHOOSE to vs DECIDE to
- there+BE construction early in a sentence appears a stable feature of both popular lore texts and academic textbook writing. How do Polish student writers compare?
- Why do you think Polish students begin sentences with wh- words nearly twice as often as what we find in (roughly) comparable native-speaker registers?
- Paragraph-initial to-infinitives tend to be associated with essay writing more than with other texts. And with a particular function and position in the text. Find out why.
- The noun care is surprisingly frequent in student essay writing. Could it be that one collocation, also frequent in popular texts, is responsible for that?
- This example illustrates one student's rather non-idiomatic ('incorrect') use of the degree adverb especially in a commenting clause. Go figure! (Polish users will probably guess the origin.)
- What are the different verbs that begin sentences?
- For more examples - see the blog and History inserts on the right
Acknowledgements:
- IFAConc is an ongoing project started in collaboration with my MA and seminar students, current and former. Thank you all!
- Special acknowledgements are due to the programmers: Pawel Nowak and Dominique Stranz (current developer).