THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE
Language Tools and Reflection
Please
use the following document to help you structure your reflections regarding your
explorations of language.You should have at
least10 entries of your own and use at least 5 different language tools. The total word length should be 1500
words. Upload the file to MyUni for the Language Tools and Reflection
assignment. Five points are also give for grammar and vocabulary (see the
rubric on MyUni for more details).
Name:
Item
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Reasons for
searching
(5 points)
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Tools and method
employed (e.g. springer.exemplar, AdTAT, Turnitin, online learner’s
dictionary, youtube pronunciation site, etc) (10 points)
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Description of
findings from language tools
(10 points)
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Reflection on
relevance of your findings for your own academic work
(10 points)
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e.g. emphasis on
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I
need to know whether ‘on’ is an appropriate collocation for ‘emphasis’. I
also want to know which verbs and adjectives collocate most frequently with
‘emphasis’.
I
was unsure about the difference between ‘emphasis’ and ‘emphasise’, and
whether they can both take ‘on’, so I also searched for ‘emphasise on’.
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I searched E-C Concord (Monoconc) using the
LOB corpus and the search string ‘emphasis’ with the associated word ‘on’,
searching to the right of the keyword. I also looked at common verbs and
adjectives to the left of the noun.
I
then did a search for ‘emphasise on’ in the LOB corpus.
|
The
noun ‘emphasis’ plus the preposition ‘on’ appear 35 times in the LOB corpus,
meaning that it is a common collocation. ‘Emphasis on’ is followed by a noun
or a noun phrase. E.g. ‘emphasis on economic as well as political
development’. I also noticed that ‘put’, ‘place’, ‘great’ and ‘strong’
frequently collocate with ‘emphasis’.
The
verb ‘emphasise’ plus the preposition ‘on’ appear only
twice in the LOB corpus, and in each case the word ‘on’ collocates with a
different word. E.g. ‘on the one hand’ and ‘depends on the year’. The verb
‘emphasise’ therefore does not collocate with ‘on’.
|
I
had always thought there was no difference between the noun and verb form of
‘emphasis/emphasise’ in regard to the following preposition ‘on’, so I made a
lot of mistakes in my academic writing and speaking because I often said
things like ‘We should emphasise on …’
These
findings mean that I should be careful to distinguish the difference between
the noun ‘emphasis’ and the verb ‘emphasise’, and use ‘on’ only for the noun
form.
Additionally,
when I use the phrase ‘emphasis on’ I can expand it to include ‘put great
emphasis on’ or ‘place great emphasis on’.
This
will make my academic writing more accurate and convincing.
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e.g. skills +critical thinking
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I
want to know the frequency of the word ‘skills’ in a corpus based on critical
thinking because I want to see if the terms ‘critical thinking’ and ‘skills’
are often used together.
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I
searched AdTAT using a pre-existing corpus of 6 academic texts based on
critical thinking. I looked for word frequency for the word ‘skills’ and then
I looked at the top 20 entries for ‘skills’ to see if the words ‘critical
thinking’ were used in the surrounding sentences.
|
The
ideas of ‘critical thinking’ and ‘skills’ frequently go together, though not
necessarily next to each other in a text. For instance, the word ‘skills’
appears 185 times in the critical thinking corpus based on 6 journal
articles, but it does not always follow the phrase ‘critical thinking’. This
means that the ideas are associated but the words can be separated. E.g. I
could write about ‘skills of critical thinking’ or ‘skills relevant to
critical thinking’.
|
Knowing
how to find word frequencies within a corpus will help me to identify words
commonly used in my discipline. This means that I don’t have to look up every
new word I come across; I can see which are the most important words and
learn those first. I can also see if certain words and phrases are used with
others, which will help me identify important concepts.
The
fact that critical thinking is a skill means that it is something that can be
learned, and its frequency in the corpus means that it is an important skill
for academic work.
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