In December 2004 and January 2005 I have been concerned with the following tasks:

Further development of exercises and keys to exercises

Small adjustments to the corpus search program

Completed the Guidelines and Introduction to the Corpus pages

The Introduction to the Corpus page will also contain links to a Corpus Header page and Corpus Search Hints page -- these are both under construction. A page about how to interpret the corpus search results will also be developed

Presentation (Progress Report) of OIE at the Department of British and American Studies, 21 December 2004

In October and November I have been concerned with the following tasks:

Further development of the corpus search program

Concordances can now be sorted by "keyword", "right word" and "left word", genre codes and headers have been added, maximum number of hits displayed (1000).

Further development of exercises

A demo set of exercises is available at http://folk.uio.no/signeo/OIE/

Use OMC/ENPC password to search the corpus

Started development of a Guidelines page and Introduction to the Corpus page

In August and September I have been concerned with the following tasks:

Further development of the corpus and corpus search program

i.e. the "cleaning-up" process of the corpus is in progress and the search options / display options are under development

Further development of exercises

Development of a Sources of Inspiration page

i.e. a Web page including references to works that have been consulted; this page will be continually updated

Continued development of the exercise html/php pages, including design and interface

Started development of an exercise score page template, including key to exercises

the key will also include corpus search hints and a link to the relevant topic in the Internet Grammar of English

Applied for funding from Norgesuniversitetet to secure further development of OIE

Preparing the launch of a demo set of exercises (possibly in October 2004)

In June and July I have been mainly concerned with the following tasks:

Programming of exercise templates, using PHP and JavaScript

The following exercise templates have been developed:
Multiple choice;
Error analysis;
Gapping.
(The aim is to have 5 or 6 different templates.)

Further development of corpora

In addition to the test corpus and texts downloaded from the Web, I hope to make use of the "Longman Corpus", which is a 10 million-word corpus that IBA acquired a number years ago. The corpus is not usable as it is, and a lot of "cleaning-up" has to be done.
As regards the choice of corpus, the development of the test corpus has proven that free and suitable texts are hard to come by. To compile a sizeable corpus by collecting free texts from the Web is time-consuming and would probably not yield a well-balanced corpus. So, although a lot of time seems to go into the preparation of the main "Longman" corpus, I believe it is worthwhile for the following reasons: we will get a well-balanced corpus with different genres; it is a fairly large, but still manageable, collection of texts.

Started development of exercises.

Started development of a "Relevant links" page,

i.e. links to student resources on the Web, including dictionaries, corpora, thesauruses, grammar exercises, etc.

Started development of the exercise html/php pages, including design and interface.

• Project meeting, Oslo, 18-19 May
• Development of preliminary home page
• Started development of test corpus
• Started development of exercise templates