New Online WebLadder Project
Brand New TextLadder 3.0
* Virtually all domains covered -- no domain-specific
lists required
TextLadder is free for non-profit use. Currently it works only
on Windows platforms.
What is TextLadder?
TextLadder is a software tool for screening and arranging texts
such that readers (usually language students) encounter new
vocabulary at a rate which they can handle.
The process by which TextLadder accomplishes this is described
in an article in the online journal Language Learning & Technology.
For more details about the new version of TextLadder (3.0), see
the documentation section of this website.
Who is TextLadder for?
TextLadder has been designed for the use of researchers, educators,
and students wishing to organize their own vocabulary learning.
As mentioned above, TextLadder is free for non-profit purposes.
This means that researchers, students, and individual teachers can
immediately download and use it.
Individuals or groups intent on using TextLadder for for-profit
purposes, e.g. publishing companies and for-profit educational
establishments, are asked to obtain a special license to do so from me.
A fee will be charged for these special licenses, which will go toward
improving TextLadder and continuing to provide it for free to those using
it for non-profit purposes.
(For-profit educational establishments located in developing
countries are exempted from the above request. Click here to see
a list of the countries included in this exception.)
Download TextLadder
1) Researchers, students, and individual teachers,
Click Here
2) Publishers, private educational establishments from
non-developing countries, and other individuals/groups intending
to use TextLadder for for-profit purposes,
Click Here
3) Educational establishments that are non-profit-based or are located
in developing countries (check list to see if you are on it),
Click Here
Other Software
Text Downloader Utility 1.00 beta
Text Downloader Utility is a simple program for downloading all the
html and text pages linked to a given web page at once. The html and
text pages are saved in text format to a folder on the user's computer
of the user's choosing. The program has been designed particularly for
users intent on building a corpus out of Internet-based texts.
Download
HTML-to-Text Conversion Utility 1.00
This is an even simpler program designed to convert all the HTML
files in a folder into text files. This is useful for users who have built
up a corpus of html files and now wish to convert these files into text
for use with TextLadder or other corpus software that require files
to be in text format. (Note that the program can convert any file
with an .htm, .html, .asp, .aspx, or .cfm extension into .txt format.)
Download
Software from other researchers
Listed below are software tools by other researchers that may be
useful to ESL teachers or to researchers involved in second
language studies or corpus linguistics.
1. The following programs are freely available for download here
under the terms of their accompanying GNU/GPL or MIT licenses:
a) Chunker -- Marcus and Ramshaw's base noun phrase chunker.
I have simply compiled the original source files into an
executable that can be run in Windows. Note, however,
that you still need to have a copy of Perl installed
on your system for Chunker to run.
Download
(If you would prefer to download the original
source files, you can do so here.)
b) Brill -- Eric Brill's part-of-speech tagger compiled for
Windows/DOS by Hamaguchi Takashi using djgpp, and
accompanied by the GO32 DOS extender (both djgpp and
GO32 are produced by DJ Delorie); I have added Brill's
original data files to Takashi's compiled executables,
and renamed these data files for use within DOS, so
everything necessary to run Brill in Windows is
included in this zip file.
(*Note*: Although this version of Brill works with
Windows 98, Me, and 2000, it does not work with
Windows XP. Windows XP users should download a
version of Brill I have compiled using MinGW32.
This version is available here.)
Download
(If you would prefer to download the original files,
you can find Takashi's DOS port of Brill here,
DJ Delorie's GO32 and djgpp here,
and Brill's original source files here.)
2. Other useful programs that you can download or use elsewhere are:
a) Range -- Paul Nation's program for generating word family
frequency and coverage information over a range of texts.
b) Web VP -- Tom Cobb's online version of VocabProfile
(similar to Range but provides frequency and coverage
information about a single text).
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