Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Ramesh Krishnamurthy: Electronic resources for language teaching and learning: cornucopia or information overload?

In many of the early courses, I could not get access to a computer at all. In some places, I had one computer whose screen display was projected onto a wall or white screen. In some sessions of Budapest 1996, and in all sessions of Debrecen 1997, Madrid 1998, and Sogndal 1998, every participant had a computer. As soon as it became feasible, I started to use a computer in my presentations, and demonstrated the corpus via an online connection, using "telnet' to login directly, or Netscape to access data via Cobuild's website (http://www.cobuild.collins.co.uk/). in the early courses, the problems that manifested themselves were fragile computer links, slow speeds of data transfer, and paucity of any other widely accessible resources. I have recently seen with envy more and more of my colleagues presenting corpus-based papers and courses using Microsoft Powerpoint on a laptop and so on. But while these presentations are often visually entertaining, and informative, they still rely on pre-prepared (and therefore static) analyses. For example, if a member of the audience asks a question about a word or language pattern that the presenter has not prepared, the question simply cannot be resolved there and then. Only direct access to the corpus can supply the answer. In principle, given the increasing power of laptop computers, and the increasing size of their hard disks, it would now be possible to take a fairly large sample of a corpus, with the retrieval software, on a laptop. But this would still mean that evidence for rarer words and patterns might not be found, and that word frequencies and collocational statistics and other corpus-size related displays would be scaled down and possibly skewed. Once you have worked with a large corpus, and got used to its scales and patterns, it is quite frustrating to work with smaller subsets. And of course one must not forget that the corpus sample would need to be re-indexed before transfer to the laptop, not necessarily a trivial task. One other technical point must be made here: until the arrival of Linux in recent years, corpora built and run on Unix systems could not be ported to a laptop PC running Windows. In 1991, there were few other electronic resources available. More recently, I have started to take additional software (Microconcord, Wordsmith Tools, Multiconcord) on floppy disks with me (and with permission from the authors), in order to demonstrate the variety and range of products now on the market - and especially products that my audience could buy for themselves and use on their personal computers at home and at work, to look at their own data collections. 21