You teach
linguistics, and you want your students to use Wordcorr for
classroom exercises and their term paper.
Your materials in Wordcorr. You probably have your favorite
class exercises already prepared on paper or on a spreadsheet. This
Web site explains how you can transfer them to Wordcorr data
sets and how you and the students can communicate by exchanging
files. It helps you download the Wordcorr program and get it set up
on your computer and your students' computers. It teaches you how to use Wordcorr on your own data,
and how the students can put together their own analyses of your
data.
Passing exercises around. This Web site also explains
linguistic data archiving and shows you how to set up for it so
that other teachers can make use of your exercises if you are
interested in a wider audience. It will eventually help you get in
touch with other teachers who use Wordcorr and who may share your
interests. At that time it will plug you into the Wordcorr Community.
Four Tasks. There are four main tasks that Wordcorr performs
for you and your students. Click to
read more about each one:
- Enter and edit data.
- Annotate the data to
show your linguistic judgments.
- Tabulate the annotated data to
get correspondence sets.
- Refine the results.
Cataloguing Information. Before you can get going with
Wordcorr, you need to provide some cataloguing
information so that your data can eventually be archived
permanently. Click to see each kind.
After you've
finished looking at this and following out some links, click here
to go to New user.
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One of the problems in teaching the comparative method in
linguistics is that the paper work it formerly required was
excruciatingly slow -- even for experts, and much more for
students.
Pocket calculators freed math and
accounting students to think about the nature of what they were
calculating. Before that they got thrown off base wondering whether
they were performing all the calculations accurately.
In a similar way, Wordcorr lets
students concentrate on finding patterns in the correspondence
sets, rather than wondering where they mislaid various slips of
paper.
Most teachers have problem sets
already worked out. It isn't hard to transfer them to Wordcorr. And
Wordcorr gives you a common sense way to use the full IPA notation,
including diacritics. |
