YES!!! This is a great resource.

[Gabrielle]

I like Just The Word a lot. I've been investigating different
concordancers and although this one isn't as powerful as some of the
others out there, it's a lot more user-friendly.

I loved Steve's idea of the mashup with Wordle. I spent way too long
on it last night (!) and created images for collocations of day,
assess, world, etc. I'm going to put them up as posters in my
classroom. I found a couple of ways to make the editing process of
the brackets and colons a bit quicker (converting text to tables and
back again) but that's the kind of thing that it should be so easy to
program. I'm not sure exactly what Steve had in mind about the
filter, but I was using the green bars to guess by eye the most
statistically significant collocations and only include those - but it
would be much quicker and more accurate to be able to just say "only
include collocations with a score of more than xxx" - again something
that should be easy to program!

The other comments I have are:

It would be great to be able to use it for colligations as well as
collocations - searching for grammatical patterns like prepostions,
"that", gerunds, modal verbs etc. Ideally without getting as
technical and scary as the full-powered concordancers!

I've had trouble with trying to enter phrases, especially if they are
more than two words long. For example, I type "go well" and click
combinations and it gives me some nice examples. But I type "get
worse" and I get nothing, even though by searching for worse I can see
that there are 51 occurences of "get worse". Another example is that
I imagined I was one of my students who yesterday said "isn't there a
phrase about breathing someone's neck?" So I typed in "breathe neck"
and clicked alternatives, and it said there were two occurences but
then refused to show them to me!

Overall, though, a massive thumbs up!

I am in the middle of writing a guide for my students and some
practice exercises they can use. If you want me to post them, I will.

Gabrielle

[monicaat...@gmail.com]

Gabrielle,

Could you please share here the JTW guide/practice exercises you've developed for your students? Do you mind if others use/adapt them for use with their students? (Giving you due credit, of course!) Thanks so much!
 
Monica

[monicaat...@gmail.com]

Hi, all,

I'm SO impressed with JTW's current capabilities! I'm just wondering whether JTW could also be programmed to output (after its fantastic grammar pattern output) relevant idioms containing one or more of the words a user has looked up (e.g., based on Gabrielle's example above, user lookup of either the words "breathe" or "neck" or the word combination "breathe neck" would display — after the grammar pattern output — idiom output, i.e., BNC examples of the English idiom "breathing down [somebody's] neck).

Monica

P.S. With Gabrielle, I'm also confused why "get worse" doesn't show up in JTW with search terms such as "get worse," "get bad," "become worse," and "become bad". . . .

[Phil Edmonds]

It's a nice idea.

One thing though: since "breathe down neck" is a grammatical collocation, you can lookup "breathe" and find "breathe down" or look up "breathe down" and find "breathe down neck", or look up "neck" and find "breathe down neck" as well. There are in fact a bunch of examples in the BNC.

For "get worse", try to look up "worse" or "get" and you will see "get worse" as a collocation, which has 51 examples in the BNC

Phil.