2009 International Conference on Applied Linguistics & Language Teaching in NTUST

During the three-day conference, I work as a staff member of book fair, which is held near IB101, the room where major talks are delivered. I attended three of the speeches but only one of them is highly related to Computer Assisted Language Learning—Corpus Linguistics & Its Application, the panelists of which are Jason S. Chang, Hao-Jan Chen and Zhao-Ming Gao.

The panel discussion is mainly about the introduction to some linguistic corpora and the utilization of them. Jason S. Chang talked about corpora and applications in language teaching; Zhao-Ming Gao error mining in learners corpora using; Hao-Jan Chen more effective use of combining two corpora.

Among all the presented online resources about corpus, I found TotalPhraseBook and writeAhead useful either in English learning or teaching. TotalPhraseBook is a concordancer in which you can enter an English or Chinese word to find out possible translations that are in example sentences. writeAhead, on the other hand, is a writing assisted system for academic writing. There is a column on the left of the homepage where you can start your piece of writing. As you type in words, the columns on the right suggest words you can use with the very last word you enter, phrases that you can proceed with and transitions that are commonly used in academic paper.

Duo to the time constraint, the panel discussion went too quickly to catch up with every idea that had been talked about. I had tried my best to jot down important information of the presentation. If the briefing had gone more slowly, I would have learned a bit more useful information. But overall, the presentation did benefit a lot the audience looking for English learning or teaching resources.