Aleksandra Wojnowska & Przemysław Kaszubski

Corpus-informed exercises for learners of English: the TestBuilder program


In this workshop we wish to present a beta version of TestBuilder -- a
corpus-driven program for building sentence-based ELT exercises that is being 
developed by Ola Wojnowska as part of her corpus linguistics BA diploma project 
at the School of English in Poznań. The program can process raw and POS-tagged 
corpora, tagged on the fly by a built-in part-of-speech tagger, and uses this as 
input for test material selection. TestBuilder features an advanced querying 
system for specifying lexico-grammatical and discourse-level contexts. The 
preliminary hits can be reviewed and pruned, and then copied into a test-editing 
window that supports several, highly adaptable, kinds of tests (e.g. cloze, 
hangman). The program is equipped with an optional key generator and several 
different saving options that allow multiple uses of results. Examples of how to 
construct exercises and tests for vocabulary, collocation and syntactic 
structure will be demostrated in the final part of the presentation.