All posts tagged: lextutor.ca

How to use Lextutor.ca to create meaningful sentence frames and stems.

Lextutor.ca is one of those hidden gems of the internet that teachers really should know about. I tell people about it, and they look at me funny. Then I tell them what it does, and they reply with “huh?” Today I’m going to explain exactly what it is, why you should be using it, and how you can use it to create more authentic sentence frames and stems for your students. To start with, Lextutor.ca is a series of softwares embedded into the site – http://www.lextutor.ca – which are tools in computational linguistics. These tools range from finding n-grams (how often a word is used in language, statistically) to concordances of various corpora (where the word in question pops up in language). That is the one that most teachers would need. The .ca in the site name is there because it’s from the University of Montreal, in Canada.  The concordance tool on Lextutor is amazing. It can compile sentence frames from millions of logged books (corpora) and present those sentences with how ever much of …