finding out information in a roundabout way

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I am applying to grad school. After I mailed my application, I emailed them to let them know, and I immediately got a reply back. Then I waited, and waited, and waited, checking my bank account often to see if the application fee had been withdrawn. Then, out of the blue, I get this email, asking me to set up an online account: I was a little shocked, but I set up the account, and then was able to find out that my application has been received (obviously) and is still pending. So....keep praying for me! If it goes through, I may be able to start an online course as early as January. And I would go to LA in July to do modular classes.

Last weekend I attended ETA, the English Teacher's Association conference in Taipei, for two days. It was kind of a test for myself, to take in some of the more academic speakers and see if I could get a handle on what corpus linguistics is! I actually really enjoyed it and learned a LOT, especially from two speakers in particular. It made me feel like I'm ready to tackle graduate studies!

A corpus is a body of text, and here they were talking about using text analysis (kind of like a database search of different kinds of published text) to inform teaching, textbook writing etc. One speaker noted that the earliest use of this method was concordancing the Bible, followed by dictionary making. Significant? It just goes to show the importance of this book through history on so many different walks of life. Very interesting stuff.