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.
Tutorials:
- The full version of IFAConc for IFA Users comprises three interfaces - Corpora Search, History, and Resources. Read about them briefly here.
You are not logged in. Please note that as of 30 March 2010, IFAConc is no longer available for anonymous use.
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).